My Lovely Wife

by Samantha Downing

  Or not.

  I turn to Millicent, who is sitting up in bed, on her tablet, researching children who are afraid of what they hear on TV.

  Again, I think about asking her about Naomi. I want to know where and how Millicent is keeping her, but I am afraid of what I might do with that information.

  I don’t think I could control myself.

  If I know where she is, I will go to see her. I will have to. What if it’s the worst-case scenario? What if she is chained to a radiator in a basement somewhere, covered in dirt and bleeding from torture? Because if that’s what I see, I’m not sure what I would do.

  If I would kill her. If I would let her go.

  So I do not ask.

  Thirty-three

  BRINGING OWEN BACK has served its purpose. No one doubts he is the one who kidnapped and killed Lindsay, the one who now has Naomi. Now it’s time for him to fade away. The only way is to stop the news: No more letters, no more locks of hair. No more missing women. No more bodies.

  We need an exit strategy. Jenna needs it.

  At the club, they are still talking about Owen. I refuse. I get out of the clubhouse, away from the gossip, even away from Kekona. We still have two lessons a week, but she is at the club every day. I spend the whole day on the court, either with a client or waiting for the next one. After the past few weeks, and the past weekend, the day is almost too normal. Something has to break it up.

  I have a lesson with a couple who has lived in Hidden Oaks since its inception. They are slow to move, but the fact that they can move at all is saying something.

  When we are done, the three of us walk up to the pro shop together. I want to get a coffee and get a look at my schedule for the week. The shortest route to the pro shop is through the clubhouse, which is where I see Andy.

  I have not seen him since before Trista left him. Back then, he looked like always: paunch around the middle, thinning hair, ruddy complexion from all that wine.

  Now, he looks all wrong. He is leaning up against the bar, wearing sweatpants that look a hundred years old. His cotton Hidden Oaks shirt is brand-new, still creased in the folds, as if he just bought it from the pro shop and put it on. He is clean-shaven, but his hair looks unkempt. The drink in his hand is brown and pure—no mixer, no ice.

  I walk up to him because he’s my friend. Or he was until I started hiding things from him.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He turns to me but doesn’t look happy. “Well, if it isn’t the pro. The tennis pro, I mean. Unless you’re some other kind of pro.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Oh, I think you know what’s up.”

  I shake my head. Shrug. Act like I have no idea what’s going on. “You okay?”

  “No, not really. But maybe you should ask my wife about that. You know her pretty well, right?”

  Before he has a chance to say anything else, I take him by the arm. “Let’s go get some air,” I say. Thankfully, he does not protest. He does not say anything that could get me in trouble at work.

  We walk through the clubhouse and out the front door. We stand in an arched walkway. Ivy crawls up and around and down the other side. In one direction, the pro shop. The parking lot is in the other.

  I stop and face Andy. “Look, I don’t know—”

  “Are you sleeping with my wife?”

  “Jesus. No.”

  He stares at me, unsure.

  “Andy, I’d never sleep with your wife. Never.”

  His shoulders slump a little as the anger leaves him. He believes me. “But she’s in love with someone else.”

  “It’s not me.” I have no intention of telling him who it is.

  “But you see her all the time. Twice a week, right? She does take tennis lessons from you?”

  “For a few years now. You know that. But she never mentioned having an affair.”

  Andy narrows his eyes at me. “Is that the truth?”

  “How long have we known each other?”

  “Since we were kids.”

  “And you think I’d be more loyal to Trista than to you?”

  Andy throws up his hands. “I don’t know. She was really upset about those missing girls. She won’t watch the news anymore.” He looks down and scuffs his foot against the faux cobblestone. “You swear you don’t know anything?”

  “I swear.”

  “All right. Sorry,” he says.

  “It’s okay. You want to grab some lunch or something?” I do not mention getting a drink.

  “Not right now. I’m going to go home.”

  “You sure?”

  He nods and walks away. Andy does not go back into the clubhouse; he goes toward the parking lot. I start to tell him he cannot drive, but I don’t. The valets will stop him. Liability and whatnot.

  * * *

  • • •

  MY LESSONS CONTINUE. There is no news. No calls, no further disruptions. Not until I leave work and stop at the car wash on the way home.

  I normally check my phone—the disposable—at least every other day, but I broke my own rule. Too much going on, too many other things to deal with.

  The phone is hidden inside the spare tire in my trunk. At the car wash, I take everything out of the back so it can be vacuumed, grabbing the phone along with everything else. As the car goes through the wash, I turn on the phone. The new-message beep startles me. Both the sound and the phone are old-fashioned. It’s not even a smartphone, just a prepaid phone that is heavier than it looks.

  I bought it at a discount store years ago. It took me a while to decide. Not on the phone itself—back then all the prepaids looked the same. It took me a while to decide to get one in the first place. A nice saleswoman came along and asked if she could help. She looked too old to know a lot about electronics, but it turned out she knew everything. And she was so patient, so kind, and I asked one question after another. The answers did not matter. I did not care about the technical details. I was trying to decide if I wanted a second phone, the disposable kind, and I think I ended up with one because at some point it would have been rude not to buy something. I had taken up too much of her time.

  I have had this thing ever since. Annabelle is just the latest entry.

  I have not thought about her since deciding she would not be the one. There has been no reason to think about Annabelle, not until she called. Or texted, I mean. It does not do any good to call a deaf man.

  Hey stranger, let’s have a drink again soon. Oh, and it’s Annabelle 

  I have no idea when she sent the message. It does not arrive on my phone until I turn it on, but she could have sent it a week ago. At least a week has passed since I checked it.

  I consider answering the text, at least to say I was not ignoring her on purpose.

  My car is still being washed, so I scroll backward on the phone. Before the text from Annabelle, there is the one text from Lindsay. The one I ignored. It is now fifteen months old.

  Had a great time the other day, Tobias. See you soon!

  Tobias. He was never supposed to have a personality of his own. And he wasn’t supposed to sleep with anyone.

  Millicent and I came up with him together. It was on a rare cold night in Florida, where the temperatures dipped below forty degrees. Between hot cocoa and a pint of ice cream, Tobias was born.

  “You can’t really change how you look,” she told me. “I mean, not without some kind of wig or paste-on beard.”

  “I’m not wearing a wig.”

  “So then you need something else.”

  I was the one who suggested pretending I was deaf. Just a few days before, I had taught a teenage kid who was deaf and we used cell phones to communicate. It stuck with me, so I suggested it.

  “Brilliant,” Millicent said. She kissed me just the way I like it.

 
Next, we discussed my name. It had to be memorable but not weird, traditional but not common. It came down to two: Tobias and Quentin. I wanted the latter because of the nickname. Quint was better than Toby.

  We debated the pros and cons of both names. Millicent even pulled up the origins of them.

  “Tobias comes from the Hebrew name Tobiah,” she said, reading from the Internet. “Quentin comes from the Roman name Quintus.”

  I shrugged. Neither origin meant anything to me.

  Millicent continued. “Quentin is from the Roman word for ‘fifth.’ Tobias is a biblical name.”

  “What did he do in the Bible?”

  “Hang on.” Millicent clicked and scrolled and said, “He slayed a demon to save Sarah and then he married her.”

  “I want to be Tobias,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Who doesn’t want to be the hero?”

  That night, Tobias was born.

  Not many people have met him—just a few bartenders and a few women. Not even Millicent has met him. Tobias is almost like my alter ego. He even has his own secrets.

  I do not answer Annabelle’s text asking me out for a drink. I shut off the phone and put it back in my trunk.

  Thirty-four

  CHRISTMAS, SIX YEARS ago. Rory was eight, Jenna was seven, and both had started asking why they had only one set of grandparents. I had never talked about my parents, never said anything about who they were or how they died. Their questions made me think about what I could say. What I should say.

  One night, I went down to the kitchen, hoping that if I filled up my stomach it would make me sleepy enough to get past the insomnia. I ate leftover black bean casserole right out of the pan. Cold, but not half-bad. I was still eating when Millicent came into the kitchen. She grabbed a fork and sat down with me.

  “What’s going on?” she said. Millicent took a big bite of the casserole and stared at me, waiting. I never got up in the middle of the night to eat. She knew that.

  “The kids are asking about my parents.”

  Millicent raised her eyebrows, said nothing.

  “If I lie and tell them their grandparents were wonderful, they’ll hate me if they find out the truth, right?”

  “Probably.”

  “But they might hate me anyway.”

  “For a while,” she said. “I think all kids go through a stage where everything will be our fault.”

  “How long does it last?”

  She shrugs. “Twenty years?”

  “I hope things are pretty quiet during that time.”

  I smiled. She smiled.

  I could tell them my parents abused me. Mentally. Physically. Even sexually. I could say they beat me, tied me up, burned me with cigarette butts, and made me walk to school and back uphill both ways. They did not. I grew up in a nice home in a nice area, and no one touched me the wrong way. My parents were refined, polite people who could recite manners in their sleep.

  They were also horrible, cold people who should not have become parents. They should have been smart enough to know a baby couldn’t fix anything.

  The final straw came when I went overseas. When I told them I wanted to take a break from college and travel, they gave me some money. I bought an open-ended ticket and a large backpack, and drank a few dozen shots. Andy and two other friends decided to join me, so we made a haphazard plan and set a date. I did not tell them, or tell anyone, that I was afraid.

  A few hours before the flight, I was still packing, still trying to decide which T-shirts to bring or if I needed a heavy jacket. Excited, yes. I was dying to get out of Hidden Oaks. Dying to get away from my childhood bedroom, where the walls were painted to look like I was in the sky, surrounded by stars. I was tired of dreaming about what else was out there, and wanted to see it for myself.

  I also had no idea what would happen. I had already failed at tennis, then again at getting into a good college. Middle-of-the-road tennis player, middle-of-the-road grades. What would happen if I was middle-of-the-road while on the road? No idea. But it had to be better than feeling like I should never have been born.

  I’d hoped I would never return and never see those sky-painted walls again.

  My parents did not drive me to the airport. A cab picked me up, because I was too embarrassed to ask for a ride from my friends and their parents. It was a Wednesday morning, my flight was early, and dawn had just started to break. My mother with her coffee cup, my father already dressed—all of us stood in the foyer, on the shiny tile, surrounded by mirrors. The vase on the center table was filled with orange chrysanthemums. The rising sun hit the crystal chandelier above us, making a rainbow on the stairway.

  The cab honked. My mother kissed me on the cheek. My father shook my hand.

  “Dad, I want—”

  “Good luck,” he said.

  I could not remember what I was going to say, so I left. It was the last time I saw them.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE END, I didn’t lie to the kids. I said their grandparents died in a freak car accident and had been gone for many years.

  I did not tell them everything, but it was close. That was because of Millicent. Together, we decided how much to say. To make it as official as possible, we called a family meeting. Rory and Jenna were so young. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but we did it anyway.

  We sat in the living room. Jenna was already in her yellow pajamas with the balloons all over them. She loved balloons, and Rory loved to pop them. Jenna’s dark hair was cut to the chin, and she had bangs straight across her forehead. Her dark eyes peeked out from under them.

  Rory was wearing a blue T-shirt and sweatpants. When he’d turned seven, he had declared himself too old for pajamas. Millicent and I decided we could live with that, and she stopped buying them.

  It was hard to look at their tiny, trusting faces and tell them that sometimes people are better off not having kids.

  “Not everyone should be a parent,” I said. “Just like not everyone is nice.”

  Jenna was the first to speak. “I already know about strangers.”

  “Not everyone in your family is nice. Or was nice.”

  Scrunched-up faces. Confusion.

  I spoke for ten minutes. That was all it took to tell my children their grandparents were not good parents.

  The irony of what I had done hit me years later, after Holly and the others. Someday, Rory and Jenna might have a talk with their kids and say the same thing about Millicent and me.

  Thirty-five

  I HAD ASSUMED THE DNA testing on the lock of Naomi’s hair would take longer than a week. Perhaps because it was always so fast on TV, I figured that their timing must be fake. That real DNA testing must take months. And apparently it does, but not for the preliminary tests. And not when the police are trying to find a woman who may still be alive.

  The tests indicate there is more than a 99 percent chance the hair belongs to Naomi.

  Kekona is the one who tells me all of this. Our regular tennis lesson becomes a class in forensics, because her new hobby is true-crime TV and documentaries. Missing and/or dead women are common on these shows.

  “Always young, beautiful, and basically innocent,” she says, ticking off the qualities one by one. She has a cup of coffee with her, and I do not think it is her first. “Although occasionally they have a case about a prostitute, as a cautionary tale.”

  “Then what?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, after this young, beautiful, and basically innocent woman goes missing, what happens?”

  Kekona holds up both her hands, as if she is trying to quiet a loud audience. “Option one—the boyfriend, because he’s jealous and possessive. Or the ex-boyfriend, because he’s jealous and possessive.”

  “Was that all one option?�
�

  “Yes. Pay attention. Option two is the stranger, or most likely a stranger. This is the psycho/stalker/sociopath/mentally ill/serial killer option. At least one of them, maybe more.”

  Kekona is not telling me anything new. I watch TV, too. But not the past day or so, because the news is still banned in our house. I missed Josh’s report about the DNA results, and I make a mental note to look it up online.

  “Possible outcomes?” Kekona says this as if I’d asked about them. I had not. “Death. Rape and death. Torture and rape and death.”

  Not much to say to that.

  “Occasionally, one lives,” she says.

  “But not often.”

  Kekona shakes her head. “Not even in fiction.”

  We go back to playing tennis. Eventually, I have another question for her. “Why do you think it’s so popular? The missing-woman story?”

  “Because who can resist a damsel in distress?”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEWS BAN in our house has always been a little fake, because all of us have the Internet on our phones. Everyone knows the DNA results. After dinner, Millicent brings me into the garage. An impromptu date night.

  She wants to discuss the results with Jenna. It’s been less than a week since the hair incident, but Jenna has seemed fine since then. Even happy. Millicent is worried about a relapse. Into what, I am not sure. I am starting to think Jenna is being proactive, not paranoid. Because who wants to be abducted by a psycho/stalker/sociopath/ serial killer? Not my daughter.

  As we sit in the car, Millicent describes her plan for how we should approach the topic. We do not want to upset her, but we do not want to ignore the news. We do not want to talk down to Jenna, but we cannot be her friend. We want to discuss but not lecture, to comfort but not baby. Millicent keeps using the word we, as if this plan is ours, not hers.