“Shit!” I try to cover my shoulder with my hand so blood doesn’t drip down onto my dress. When I reach the street, I put my shoes on and try to walk casually. The last thing I need is for someone to see me running out of the bushes, bleeding, barefoot and muddy. I text Collin saying I’ll call back in just a second. I try to wipe up the cut on my arm and clean my muddy feet with the only thing I can find, a box of Kleenex rolling around on the backseat floor. The wispy pieces only stick to the cut, so I give up and toss all the damp, muddy tissue into a soggy pile on the passenger seat. I check my face, smooth my hair in place and FaceTime Collin back.
When he answers, I see they are at Morty’s, a restaurant we all love going to. Ben is in the back, trying to push himself into the frame so I see him. I wave to him as Collin tries to refocus him back on his crayons and kids’ coloring menu.
“Hey there. We’re at Morty’s, so Ben wanted to call to tell you.”
I hear Ben yell, “It’s her favorite!” from the background.
“Oh, how sweet. Sorry I missed you. I was just finishing up a conversation and didn’t hear my phone.”
“It’s fine. We actually just sat down. Rachel’s practice went late. But Ben got you...” He has a singsong tone in his voice, then he pauses and pans the phone quickly over to Bennett for dramatic effect.
“Look, Mom. It’s lemon meringue!” Ben holds up a small take-out box and beams.
“He saw it in the pastry case on the way in and said we had to get it for you,” Collin says, giving Ben a high five. “Sweet kid.”
“Sweeeet kid,” I repeat in agreement. “Thanks, Benny!”
“Did you eat? Anything else you want us to bring home?”
“Oh, I’m fine. But thanks.”
“You can stop by if you’re done and meet us if you want.” I wonder if he can see the lie as it quickly shapes in my mind. I can’t show up like this, obviously.
“You know what, I actually—I cut myself,” I say, angling my phone for him to see. It works out well to use this now instead of explaining it later, which I’d have to do anyway.
“Oh my gosh, hon. What happened?”
“That bookstore is about a thousand years old. It was just a nail sticking out of the wood—I leaned against the wrong ancient wall and snagged it.”
“Sheesh. You should sue.”
We both laugh because he always says we should sue when any unfortunate little occurrence happens.
“I’m fine. I’ll head home and clean it up. I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Okay. Say bye, kids,” he says, maneuvering the phone to show Rachel and Ben behind him, but they don’t look up. Rachel stays glued to her phone and Ben is now scratching in the ear of a cartoon cat with a purple crayon. Collin blows me a kiss and we hang up.
I sit a moment, the sudden silence humming in my ears. The evening sun sits like a red mountain on the horizon just before it gives way to dusk. It’s getting dark early. It’s not even eight yet, and I’m grateful they’ve just sat down to dinner and that I have time.
I can smell him on my clothes. I’ll wrap my dress in a plastic hanging bag left over from the cleaners when I get home—say some blood from my cut got on it and bring it in to get dry-cleaned. My lies are coming too quick, too easily. What am I becoming?
7
I DRIVE THROUGH THE darkness with the windows down. The air is earthy and heavy; katydid and cricket songs fizz in my ears as I pass the thickets along these otherwise empty roads. My phone startles me. I see Collin’s name pop up on the square of light in the passenger seat. When I answer, there is silence.
“Collin?” I say, wondering why he’d call back so soon if they’re at dinner. He doesn’t respond. I can actually see my heartbeat, it thumps so hard. It pulsates the fabric of my dress.
“Collin. Hello?”
Last time I freaked out over his silence it was a brief bad connection. So I wait, listening. Pinpricks of heat pass between my breastbone and down my spine. He says nothing. I only hear breathing and murmurs of distant conversation in the background. He knows.
“Collin,” I say again, shakily. He can’t even bring himself to speak. Then the call cuts off. I pull over at the next turn, and drive into the parking lot of Bourbon and Spirits; the I and the R in the word “Spirits” has been burned out so long that everyone calls the place Bourbon and Spits. I’m shaking uncontrollably. I pull to the back of the broad dirt lot against a towering wall of switchgrass and dandelions. I turn off the engine and stare down at the phone in my lap, hunched over in a miserable curve. I try to calm my quivering hands so I can dial him back. I start to hyperventilate, I force myself to take a deep breath. But before I can tap his name on my screen, a text pops up.
Butt dial. Sorry! An emoji shaped like a little butt and another emoji slapping its face in embarrassment follows. The rush of relief is dizzying. I can’t force myself to move or text back. I let the phone slip out of my hand and I sob into the steering wheel.
After a few minutes of ugly, hiccup crying, I stop cold when I hear something. The country music and howling from inside the bar is low and muffled, but still obscures the noise I’m certain I heard. A woman, maybe. Calling out for help? I open my car door and step softly. I push my ear forward, straining to hear. It sounded like someone screaming. Just a short, blunt, stifled scream. I take one of Ben’s baseball bats from his equipment bag in the trunk and stand in the wet, still air, waiting for another noise to tell me which direction it came from.
There’s a Ford pickup across the lot where the woods meet the dirt clearing. I can make out a man’s figure, just a shape in a streetlamp’s glare. I see him zip up his pants, and there’s a woman. He has her pinned against the side of his truck. I see her more clearly as I edge closer.
“Please,” is all I hear her say, and then she cowers as he raises his fist. He laughs at her and hits the metal of the truck bed instead, just missing her face: a warning. She scrambles to pull her shorts back up. She’s crying.
What should I do? I should call the police. Shit, no...I shouldn’t get involved. His hand is around her neck, he’s saying something, inches from her face. I can see the mist of his spit under the cone of light above him from the streetlamp all the way from here. Before I can unfreeze my body and make a run to my phone or run to her or do something, he lets go. She holds her neck and grips the side of the truck, trying to escape him, inching to one side so she can run. Suddenly, he turns away as if he’s done tormenting her, then turns back. His fist bashes the side of her face and she falls.
“Think you’ll say no to me? Look at you!” he yells, then picks his beer up from the ground and mutters, “Fucking bitch.”
When he walks back toward the bar, I swear he sees me. He’s looking my way, but he doesn’t, somehow. But I see him. I cannot believe who I’m looking at.
It’s Joe. Homecoming King Joey. Ben’s coach. Officer Joe Brooks. When I see he’s inside, swallowed up by the patrons and music, I toss the bat in the backseat and run over to the woman.
“Are you okay?” I ask, breathless, kneeling down next to her.
“Who are you? Fuck. Get away from me.” She yanks her arm away from my touch. I see that her mouth is bleeding.
“Sorry. Can I help you? I mean—are you—we should call the police. I saw what happened.”
After I say it, I realize why she’s looking at me the way she is. Joe Brooks is the police.
She sits against the truck and buries her head in her hands, crying. I can see she’s tipsy.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I need to go home. He was my ride. I got a kid at home.”
“Let me take you.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“I saw what happened though. Did he...” I pause, but I need to ask. I need to help. I don’t say the words sexually assault you. I just look do
wn at her still-unbuttoned shorts and then away. She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t have to. She holds herself tighter with one arm wrapped around the opposite elbow and wipes her eyes with her free hand as she looks up, avoiding me.
“We need to get you outta here.”
She stumbles a little on the way to my car. When we pull out, I remember the first aid kit in my glove compartment. I open it and tell her to grab the alcohol pads for her lip.
“Thanks.” She rips open tiny paper squares and presses the cold pads to her face. Then she lights a cigarette and stares out the window.
“You know, just ’cause he’s a cop doesn’t mean you shouldn’t report him. That’s just—I can’t even...”
“You know Joey?”
“Yes. Well, I thought I did. I mean what happened? If you don’t mind my asking?”
“So, you’re fucking him too?”
“What—NO! What? Why? No.” I stammer, shocked at the question, feeling accused.
“Well, any girlfriend of Joe’s would never say they haven’t seen him like that. Is all.”
“This has happened before?”
I’m sincerely beside myself in disbelief. She just makes a scoffing sound and sort of laughs, ripping open a bandage with her free hand, puffing on a cigarette with the other.
“So, you’re his girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“I was his girlfriend. I finally get out, ya know I finally did it, I stopped comin’ back to the bullshit. I was there with a date, even, till I ran into that prick. He got me again. All the sweet-talkin’. Send this loser home, he says. Tells me he’s changed. God, and I fucking fell for that bullshit again!”
“You sent your date away?” I ask. She blows a thread of smoke out the window.
“The guy is fuckin’ good. He’s real good.”
“I can’t believe Joe Brooks would act—I mean, he hit you. Jesus—I...”
“That? That was nothin’.”
When she says this, she blinks back tears. I think of how bad it must be if that was “nothing.”
“And you don’t report him?” I ask. She tosses her butt out the window and its fiery end skips down the road in the darkness behind us. She looks at me pointedly.
“You gotta promise me you’re not gonna say nothin’ to no one.”
I look at her, at the fear and anger in her swollen eyes.
“Yeah. Okay. I mean...”
“He can make your life hell. Him and all those good ole boys he works with. I made that mistake once—reporting what he done to me. My word against his. All his friends in the department there protecting him. You’ll regret it as much as I did if you say anything.”
She crosses her arms and leans into the night air that’s rushing in the window. I imagine how the he-said, she-said would go. She’s a single mom with alcohol on her breath and track marks that I can see on the insides of her arms. Her word against kids’ baseball coach and cop Joe Brooks. I feel nauseous.
She points to her street, and I turn in and drop her at the end of Sycamore Street, which leads to the trailer community half a mile down. I don’t offer to take her all the way, I’m sure she doesn’t want me to know where she lives.
She gets out and closes the door, but leans back in a moment.
“He was there with his friends, celebrating his promotion to detective. For your own good, like, for real, don’t be stupid and go reporting anything.”
“Okay,” I say, and she stares at me, studying, clearly deciding whether I’m telling the truth or not.
“Thanks for the ride.”
“Yeah. I’m Melanie, by the way. Melanie Hale.” I scribble my phone number down on the back of a gum wrapper I find in the center console and hand it to her.
“In case you ever need it, I don’t know,” I say, suddenly insecure, wondering if it’s too much. She takes it and nods.
“Lacy Dupre,” she says as she pulls out another smoke. “Anyway, I know who you are. Joe pointed you out once at a baseball practice. You’re one of the moms he went to school with. Said you were ‘fuckable.’”
“He said that to you when you were dating him?”
“Yep.”
“Classy,” I say, and she lights another cigarette, gives me a final, curt wave and walks unsteadily down the black road toward her home.
8
IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, autumn settles slowly as it does in the South, with slight drops in temperature that offer only a small respite from the white-hot sun and merciless humidity. Rachel didn’t make cheerleading, so she spends even more time in her room scrutinizing her appearance and general self-worth. The makeup tutorial YouTube channel she started only has nine likes, so that explains why I find a mound of expensive cosmetics congealing in the heat, on top of the garbage next to the garage. I try to rescue a sticky red clump that used to be lipstick, pushing it back into its tube, but it’s no use.
Collin suggested we go down to the bayou and fish, maybe charter a boat for the day and camp. Rachel loves being on the water and stopping for boiled peanuts. She doesn’t exactly jump for joy, but a half nod and not getting her bedroom door slammed in our faces is a win, so on Saturday, we all pile in the car to drive to Spanish Lake.
The tents and supplies are strapped on the top of the SUV, and we look just like the Griswolds coming down the highway, I’m sure. I’m like one of the kids, glued to my phone as Collin drives. I skipped Thursday’s writing group. I didn’t trust myself to go, to risk another note or worse—that I might take Luke up on his offer—and I resist the urge to look up his name on social media. I don’t want any record that I even know who he is. But I want so desperately to see the thumbnail of his face bloom on my screen. I want to see candid shots of him at a ball game with friends, or with his toddler nephew on his shoulders at a backyard pool party. I want to see the shameless selfies. I wonder if he takes any. Maybe one on his balcony in Italy—just his face, the subtle duck-lipped expression he doesn’t realize he’s making, with the vast Mediterranean blue behind him.
I lay naked next to this man while he expressed his fear of dementia—his grandfather had early-onset—while he wrestled with regrets of not having kids, even though he always exclaims how great it is to be free. I laughed under the sheets as he walked through the house naked because he heard Roger, the stray cat, crying at the door and he had to run down and bring him some milk.
He counts on me, he joked, leaping back into bed, and rolling me on top of him to make love again that first night. I knew his love for animals. He showed me the locket he always keeps on him, in a pocket somewhere, handed down from his grandmother, which holds a photo of his beloved, deceased dog, Henry.
I knew his body—the body of a man who doesn’t work twelve-hour days and come home to kids, who can spend countless hours at the gym between writing chapters at cafés. But then again, I don’t really know him at all.
The cut on my left shoulder is almost healed. It’s just a wisp of a papery scab now. Collin smiles at me, kisses his finger, then touches it to the cut. I’m pulled out of my fantasy. I put my hand on top of his and kiss it. Because that’s what he expects me to do, and I need to act normal. And because I want to. I love him. I don’t know why I’ve done what I’ve done. He glances in the rearview mirror and then nods for me to look at Ben in back. Ben’s face is plastered to the window, asleep, and Rachel has nodded off sitting up, her head bobbing. I’m so grateful for them, and I feel a twinge of pain behind my eyes. Guilt, maybe. I’m angry at myself for letting my thoughts of him take me away from these moments with them.
When we pull into Biff’s boiled peanut and crawfish stand, everyone uses the restroom, and I sit on a picnic table in the shade while the kids get their peanuts. After I call the home health aide who is looking after Claire to check in, I decide to look up Lacy Dupre. There are a few with th
at name on Facebook, but I see her photo right away. I click on her profile. To my surprise, much of it is public. Her occupation says “Cashier at Lucky’s Truck Stop.” Her cover photo is her in a slicked-back ponytail and hoop earrings with a toddler on her hip. Her son, I guess. I study him to see if he looks like Joe Brooks. I scroll through dozens of photos, but no trace of Joe in any of them. I get the feeling she’s the sort of girlfriend he calls “just some chick he messes around with now and then” when he talks to his friends.
Probably not even that. He’s slippery. I bet he doesn’t claim her at all. I bet he doesn’t take her anywhere in public. She’s just a quick lay to him, in and out, and she waits for him anyway, pretending it’s more. If he wanted a fuck the other night, he probably worked it out for himself to meet her later, convince her to ditch the other guy. Maybe she embarrassed him in front of his good-ole-boy friends with the audacity to show affection or act like a couple, and he flipped. I know she said she’d finally broken up with him, but I also know she often goes back to him.
I didn’t report what I’d seen, but I can’t just do nothing. I know what I saw, but it seems like the smoky ends of a dream you try to keep in your mind as you wake up, the details blurry, evaporating. There has to be a way to expose Joe Brooks. I quickly send her a friend request and put my phone in my purse so I don’t keep checking to see if she’s accepted.
When evening falls, we sit around a firepit by the water’s edge. Collin boils red potatoes and some crawfish the kids collected. The flames dance and pop and silvery ash soars, then falls like summer snow. Mosquitoes force Rachel and Ben into their tent early to watch a movie on Ben’s iPad, so Collin and I retrieve bottles of beer from the icy water in the bottom of the cooler and walk down to the dock to put our feet in the water.
There is a hint of a breeze in the air and the glow of fireflies in the trees looks like strings of blinking lights. We kick off our flip-flops before we walk barefoot down the wooden slats to the end of the dock. Collin takes my hand and puts his other hand behind his ear playfully, listening.
Such a Good Wife Page 7