The Trailing Spouse

by Jo Furniss

  Amanda marked the shoes as sold. She logged out and logged in again, this time as Jacaranda Mitchell / identity2. Here she was selling a Prada purse, another surprise gift from Ed. It had rarely been out of its dustcover. “Jacaranda” ignored the first name in the queue—Amanda knew the woman from the Sentosa Club and couldn’t risk being recognized—and messaged the second. Her buyers would meet her in some mundane location where the stardust of the original designer packaging would shine. Thousands of dollars would slide across a Starbucks table, sticky with frothed milk, and Amanda would take it home to hide in the expectant belly of one of her ornamental ginger jars.

  The taxi veered to the exit and turned almost immediately onto a narrow lane flanked by jungle.

  “Haunted!” The taxi driver shifted in his seat.

  The meeting was at the home of a woman Amanda thought of as “Hostess with the Mostess.” She lived in a Black and White, one of Singapore’s colonial-era mansions named for their distinctive dark timber beams and whitewashed walls, located in jungle locations that meant they were overrun with snakes, monkeys, and maintenance bills. Beautiful as they were, Black and Whites appealed mainly to expats who were willing to pay for a romantic slice of history. And who weren’t as superstitious as taxi drivers.

  “Pontianak, you know? They live in the trees.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Not ghosts. Vampires. Angry women who lost their babies.”

  “Angry women I do believe in.”

  “Ah!” The taxi uncle was pleased that she agreed.

  Amanda pointed out the house and paid the driver, then pushed through the iron gate. Heat swarmed inside her clothes, and even in the shade of the tembusu trees, her skin prickled and started to seep. She reached the cool of the carriage porch—they knew how to build for the climate in those days—and realized she’d left her expensive gift of moon cakes in the cab. Now she was empty-handed.

  Inside the dim interior, voices were muted. Usually, they were as sharp as elbows in a crowd. She followed a mahogany staircase to the upstairs living area, where the ladies hunched over chips and dips. Mostess charged across the rug to scoop her into the group, which barely greeted her before turning back to a woman Amanda knew as Crazy Antic—because of her infamous holiday disasters—who was simultaneously crying, talking, and gesticulating with a hummus-loaded tortilla chip. All the women lowed in sympathy except Mostess, whose eyes traced the flight path of the chip above her antique carpet.

  “And she WhatsApped me this morning—totally jet-lagged, hasn’t slept in a week—and poor little Livvy can’t even put on her own panty hose. She’s literally never worn a pair in her life. And suddenly, boom, she has to get up on Monday morning in freezing-cold London and go to a new school wearing panty hose.” Crazy Antic finished by pushing the whole chip into her mouth with her palm. Mostess sat back on her planter’s chair, turned her head to Amanda, and stage-whispered: “Ann’s talking about Melissa Hodge—plays tennis at the British Club, three kids at the British Overseas School?”

  Amanda shook her head.

  “Ran the Great Wall marathon with Ann? You remember the time Ann fell off the wall?”

  “Oh, Melissa!” Clearly, everybody knew Melissa, so Amanda figured she should too.

  “Lovely, lovely woman. Husband was killed last month. Light aircraft came down in Indonesia—”

  “Microlight,” Crazy Antic corrected, spitting baba ghanoush.

  “Microlight came down in Indonesia. Broke his neck. As if that isn’t bad enough, the policeman who informed Melissa of the death mentions in passing, ‘By the way, you know you have thirty days to leave Singapore?’ And Melissa’s like, ‘I’ve lived here for thirteen years and you’re giving me a month?’ And the officer’s sympathetic, but them’s the rules.”

  “She could have appealed,” said Crazy Antic, “but she couldn’t afford to stay.”

  The trailing spouses murmured about rental prices.

  Someone said, “You never know how long you’ve got, do you? Ticktock . . .”

  The fragility of life and lifestyle circled book club on the syrupy afternoon breeze. It drew the conversation into a spiral of competitive woe that covered homesickness, a marriage on the rocks, postnatal depression. The horror of what had happened to Awmi the previous night was a burning coal in Amanda’s stomach, but she held it inside. She wasn’t sure how these women would react. And her anger at Ed’s decision to go to Manila—even if it was for a make-or-break meeting—was still raw. A single verbal sideswipe from one of these strident women would bruise her thin skin. Instead, she thought of Melissa Hodge’s child, whatever her name was, wrenched out of the Singaporean sun into an inhospitable London winter. There was something Dickensian about the rapid change in fortune, the death of the patriarch plunging his family into the cold. It was self-absorbed, Amanda knew, to feel a chilly blast of recognition, but her eyes filled at the thought of losing Ed. Those condoms suggested it was a possibility.

  She felt a squeeze on her bicep and turned to see moist eyes looking into her own.

  “The shock’s hitting you, isn’t it?” Mostess said. “Melissa would be touched to know she’s so well loved.”

  Amanda excused herself and roamed acres of polished parquet toward a bathroom. A sideboard stocked with family photos and enigmatic curios was laid out like a finger buffet of fulfillment. She pushed herself past it into a covered veranda, past the kids’ rooms: a pink bed and a blue bed.

  In the bathroom, she closed the door and stood before the sink. The romantic house, the perfect children, the solid husband. She really was the Mostess. Amanda picked up two Disney-character toothbrushes and took a moment to decide which was her favorite.

  On her way back to the fray, she fell into step behind a helper carrying a tray of white wine spritzers. Book club eyed the arrival of the drinks like sailors in a brothel. Amanda took her seat and watched the maid clear the table. At last month’s meeting, it never occurred to her to consider the helper, but now she wondered what the woman was thinking. Was she full of envy? Or resentment? Or was she simply content to do a job—as billions of people around the world do every day—and see money in the bank at the end of the month? Amanda had a sudden urge to question the woman, as though she might have insight into whatever Awmi had been thinking, but of course that was ridiculous; they were different people, from different backgrounds, with different experiences.

  The women toasted their host, who then turned to Amanda. “I’ve been thinking about you since last meeting. I meant to drop you a line, but we had half-term and then I was organizing table decorations for the gala ball . . . How is your health?” Such a carefully chosen phrase; she’d clearly planned it. Amanda couldn’t remember how much she’d told them the previous month. She’d drank too much at that meeting—no reason not to anymore—and recalling her exact words was like looking for a coin in the deep end of a swimming pool.

  They’d read a memoir about infertility and adoption; all the women cried, except Amanda. At the mention of a miscarriage, someone commented that “everything happens for a reason” and all the women mooed in agreement. Amanda’s throat lumped with ripostes that she knew would be social suicide if she let them come out: for what reason have I lost my baby again, for what reason has your particular celestial being decided that I deserve this, what possible reason could justify your bad philosophy, bad theology, bad advice? You’re basically saying, Amanda had wanted to spit out, that what happened to me—what has happened to me three times now—is right, fair, benign. But you know what—you smug, fertile creature—to me, these miscarriages feel wrong, unfair, cruel. Unreasonable. She’d chewed that anger back and felt it scrape down her throat like a broken tortilla chip, until right at the end of book club, when that thoughtless woman left, and Amanda blurted out the news of her most recent loss.

  The women who’d been heading out the door with purses over their shoulders came back to the sofa. Several had had miscarriages too, i
ncluding Mostess. Someone said, “It’s okay to be angry,” and Amanda cried in relief. Mostess said, “Even if it was early days, it was still your baby,” and Amanda hugged her. But then someone else said, “At least you know you can get pregnant,” and the tortilla chip of anger threatened to make a reappearance. Mostess wrapped it up by saying, “We don’t talk openly enough about miscarriage,” and the women agreed and apologized because they had to rush home before school buses delivered their children, who—judging by the put-upon tones—were tiny vampires who terrorized their mothers for snacks and cuddles.

  Now Amanda’s eyes filled again. Mostess topped up her wine and gripped Amanda’s arm. Strangely, the hand steadied her. Kindness spread like the warmth that follows an electric shock.

  “My husband wanted to stop the fertility treatment. ‘Just for a while,’ he said, though I’ve never fully understood why. So I’ve been doing it on my own. Paying for it myself. After all, he’s made his contribution and we have two frozen embryos left. I can’t just leave them in the freezer, can I? And if I get pregnant and it sticks this time, I’m sure he won’t care how it came about.”

  She thought she detected a sourness spreading through the air like a dash of lime cordial. She took a shot of wine and felt alcohol rush into her veins to form a moat between herself and their opinions.

  What if he finds out?

  Are you sure he’s ready for a child?

  Doesn’t he have a right to know?

  Afternoon sunlight streamed through the wooden shutters, creating leaden shadows. She felt cloaked in wine while the women talked, supporting her or Ed’s case. They took sides, as black and white as the house they sat in.

  She remembered how, at her last gynecologist appointment, she’d explained to the doctor that she felt guilty about leaving her babies—blastocysts, Dr. Chan gently corrected her—suspended on ice, not allowed to live and yet very much in existence, like tiny prisoners on death row. Unless she went back for them one day, they would eventually be destroyed. They had a life span before they were even alive. Dr. Chan suggested that she might consider a mild antidepressant.

  Someone passed Amanda the tortilla chips and told her to hang in there. She took one and snapped it into the shape of a flint head. “You know, 6 percent of couples never get pregnant. Someone has to be the statistic. I’m blonde and rich and healthy, so I don’t look like a statistic, but what if I’m the unlucky one? What if being blonde and rich and healthy used up all my luck?” The woman who passed the chips raised her eyebrows. Mostess cleared her throat, and Amanda decided not to mention that her unborn embryos cried out to her in the night.

  Instead she ate the tortilla chip in silence. Outside the window, a bird launched into an urgent song, as luscious and hard as the sunlight.

  “I wish I’d never had children,” Mostess said.

  Someone agreed: “We all have those days.”

  “No, it’s every single day. I regret having children every single day. I love them—I do—but I wish I’d never started a family.” Mostess laughed harshly, like a dog’s strangled bark when it ran to the end of its chain. “Regretting having your children. Now there’s a taboo.”

  Amanda glanced around the group; the women’s faces had turned as pink as a raw nerve.

  Mostess carried on. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, really. I thought it was postnatal depression, but it’s different. My husband feels it too; says he’s become a machine. It’s like . . .” She nodded out through the window to the tropical garden. “There’s a kind of ficus in the rain forest that clings to a healthy tree and grows all around it, blocking the sunlight and hogging the nutrients, until the original tree rots from the inside and disappears, and the ficus is all that’s left, wound around a void.” Mostess threw her glass up toward her mouth and noticed halfway that it was empty. “I used to buy ficus plants when I was a student but couldn’t keep the bloody things alive. Now they’re everywhere.” She stopped herself, pulling up with a jerk. “I’m sorry, Amanda. I don’t mean to downplay what you’re going through.”

  “It’s okay, really it is,” Amanda said. And it was. The honesty was refreshing. In that moment, Amanda decided that she too hated the jungle. Its fecundity was a slap in the face. She nodded at a display of stylized family photos and squeezed Mostess’s arm. “Your children look happy. You’re doing a great job.”

  Mostess gripped her hand in return. “But I’m afraid they’ll find out.”

  Amanda took a taxi with two other women. She scrunched down in the front seat, using her compact to replace foundation that had sweated off. The conversation in the back returned to Melissa Hodge’s dead husband and the impact on the daughter.

  “Do you ever wonder what your husband gets up to when he travels?”

  “I assumed his midlife crisis might involve backstreet bars in Bangkok. But thrill-seeking? Microlights? That’s new.”

  The taxi’s jerky progress made Amanda nauseous. When a station for the underground MRT train appeared, she signaled to the driver, and he swerved across two lanes to drop her at the curbside. As she clambered out, her bag fell open and the contents scattered on the grass verge: phone, purse, Little Mermaid toothbrush. She snatched it all up and hid from the gossiping mothers as the taxi lurched into the traffic.

  Chapter 4

  Camille opened her mouth to ask what the difference was between kopi O and kopi C, but the elderly woman behind the counter slammed down a glass and said, “Kopi peng.” Camille paid and picked up the iced coffee. The café was packed with office workers grabbing lunch; she headed for the only free seat under a fan.

  It was worth two dollars to gain entry to this kopitiam, one of Singapore’s original coffee houses. She placed her drink—the color of carrot soup—on the far side of the marble table, leaving space for her Filofax, which was as outmoded and as well loved as this café. Her finger tapped the cover with the relentless rhythm of a dripping tap while she surveyed the scene. But nothing triggered memories, not even the saccharine smell of Carnation milk in her kopi peng. Across the road was a branch of Starbucks, the logo flouncing its long hair to call Camille hither. Its familiarity was tempting, but she resisted.

  It had taken over an hour to find the Filofax in the cartons she’d shipped from London a year ago. When Collin helped her pack, he’d sardonically marked the boxes as “childhood treasures.” He’d scoff if he knew they clogged up her wardrobe, growing silverfish and mildew. He wouldn’t understand that they didn’t need to be unpacked: their proximity was enough.

  The Filofax opened to photographs that had faded to the color of boat varnish. She hesitated over a picture of her parents on a hospital bed hugging a newborn who must be either Camille or Collin. There was no one who could confirm which sibling, no date scribbled on the print, no clue whispered through time. With no one to recount her early years, Camille felt she had simply floated down to earth as a fully formed child around the time her memory became more or less reliable.

  She flipped to another photo, which she slipped from its plastic sheath. Her eyes lingered on her parents in a kopitiam like the one where she sat now. The tiles on the wall were different, but they could have been replaced. In the picture, there was a poster in Tamil script. She brought the photo almost to her nose, eyes moving more quickly from the image to the street outside. Then she slid it back inside the Filofax and clipped the organizer shut. Her chair made a sharp complaint as she stood up to leave.

  This was not the same coffee shop; she wouldn’t find out any more about her parents here. Nothing to do with the tiles, but—idiotic not to have noticed it before—the arched doorway to this kopitiam was obscured by a pillar belonging to the covered walkway outside. In the photo, her parents were framed in a perfect arch, and she could glimpse the shape of a pagoda across the street. After such a long time, she had a fresh clue, and she filed it in a clandestine folder in her mind.

  Whereas most people rely on memories to keep loved ones alive, Camille suppressed h
ers in order to make her parents dead. Dead rather than “missing.” Not better, but simpler. “Dead” was final. “Missing” was an unintelligible whisper, a shadow disappearing around a corner, the incessant flapping of a door in the wind. An earworm. An itch. It drove her mad. It had almost driven her mad.

  When she left London for Singapore, she’d promised Collin that she wouldn’t start asking questions again. Questions like: Why? Why would two perfectly normal people vanish? With no definitive answer, there was only one explanation on which Collin and Camille could agree: they didn’t know all the facts. But whereas Collin was content with that, the mystery gnawed at her, a constant scratching as though she lived in a house with rats in the wall cavities. And she started to wonder: perhaps they weren’t perfectly normal people . . . Her madness had developed its own buoyant logic. And here she was again, pursuing memories dredged up by the Bonhams’ helper. She’d grown up with a helper—Collin had too, but Camille was younger, more dependent on the stability Lani offered when their parents were away doing . . . whatever they had really been doing.

  But why now? Camille thought. Why had this case opened up her curiosity about the past? It had started with the maid’s belongings in those cold evidence bags. The intimacy of the woman’s contraceptives. In her volunteer work for HELP, Camille crafted women’s stories into press releases; they were case studies, kept at arm’s length. But at the Bonhams’ apartment, she had stood in Awmi’s home and workplace, seen where a woman chose to die. It felt personal.