Overnight Wife

by Wylder, Penny

  “No, I told you his family is,” I clarify. “And crazy would be an understatement when it comes to his mother.” I can still picture that heap of gifts. Her face as she told me I owed them a baby, in exchange for being kept. Like I was some kind of pet her son had adopted at the shelter and dragged home.

  My stomach churns again. Would I want to bring a child into that world?

  But then I think about John. I think about his face when he talked about finding a wife, settling down. Or the way he looks at me, like I’m the only woman in the world who’s ever ignited him. We work so well together—both in marriage and in our actual work. If there’s anyone in the whole world I could picture myself having a family with, it’s him. He’s someone who would actually participate fully, who wouldn’t leave me to care for the kid all on my own, but who would take an equal role in parenting. I’m sure of it.

  But… the weight settles like lead in my stomach. I think about my career. Everything I’ve worked for. My whole life, which is really only just beginning. Can I really derail that? With a change as huge as this?

  Then again. Look at my marriage, and how badly I thought it would derail me. When in fact, meeting and accidentally marrying John might have been the best decision of my life. If anything, it only improved my life—my whole life, not just the career I’d always been focused on to the point of ignoring the rest of my needs.

  “I can hear those wheels of yours churning. What are you thinking?” On the other end, I hear splashes, no doubt as Lea ducks into her shower.

  I sigh into the receiver. “I don’t know, Lea. I don’t know what I want to do. I never thought I’d want a family this young—someday, sure, but now? But then, I think about John, about having a family with him specifically, and… I don’t know.”

  There’s another long pause, followed by the telltale slosh of bathwater, before Lea’s voice returns closer to the microphone. “Well, take the test. Like I said, no use making plans until you know. And once you do know, you can make an informed decision, with all the facts. Yeah?”

  “You’re right.” I tilt my head back to squint up at the blue sky overhead. It’s shaping up to be a beautiful day. Too pretty to be stressing like this, at least until, like she says, I know the truth. “What if I am though?” I murmur. “How the hell am I going to tell him?”

  “A card is always nice,” she replies, and I burst into laughter.

  “Thanks for the pep talk.”

  “Call me with the results?” she asks before I disconnect.

  “Of course. Soon as I know.” I hang up and tug my car keys from my pocket, jangling them between my fingers. Time to face the music.

  * * *

  Well. I should have guessed it.

  I squat in the bathroom of the CVS, staring at the test in my fingers. Staring, more specifically, at the thin pink line that marks a sharp and sudden divide in my life. Before and after. As in, before I went and got myself knocked up by my new husband, and after I realized that this already complicated as hell mess is about to get a million times more complicated.

  I shoot Lea a text, aware that I promised to call her. But I can’t handle hearing her voice right now. Even my best friend’s reassurances won’t help. Not now.

  I shut my eyes and ignore the phone as it buzzes away in my lap. Lea tries twice more before she gives up and texts me back instead.

  Never doubt the power of a well-worded card, is all she says, clearly deciding to opt on the side of lighthearted. She knows me too well. She knows that I can’t handle looking at this seriously right now.

  But the words draw a laugh out of me anyway, albeit a reluctant one.

  Still. It’s not the worst idea. I’m going to have to tell John somehow. And in spite of us deciding that we want to really seriously try to make this marriage work… I’m still not entirely sure how he’s going to handle news like this. News this huge.

  I deposit the test in the trash and trudge out to my car, hands tucked into my pockets. Along the way, I stop in the CVS card section and buy a card. I labor and debate over the type—Congratulations? Condolences? Thank you for the baby? Sorry, but guess what?

  Finally, I settle on one of the blank cards, the front covered in glitter and flowers. At least it doesn’t have any cheesy pre-written messages inside. I want to write my own, although what exactly I plan to say, I’m still not sure. How do you explain something like this?

  I spend the whole drive back to work thinking it over, my brow furrowed. When I get to the office, it’s late—the only parking spot available is pretty far from the front. But that’s fine. It gives me more time to think. I pull into it and shut off the car, then lean my head on the steering wheel, eyes shut, hands gripping the leather, and force my tired brain to think.

  Under all my fear and worries, there’s an undercurrent of emotion I can’t ignore. An undercurrent of… happiness. Because that’s how I feel when I’m with John. And if that’s how I feel with him, just the two of us, then how much happier will I feel when it’s three of us? When we have a family. When our marriage becomes indisputably, permanently, real.

  Finally, the right words come to me. I pull the card out and prop it on the dashboard, starting to write.

  I lay it all out. How I feel about him, which came out of nowhere, as unexpected as the wild night that led to our marriage. And I end with how I’m feeling now—like this could be the same situation. Something wild and unexpected… but right. Something that could improve both our lives, as long as we keep our priorities straight. As long as we’re both all in.

  When I finish, signing it feels wrong. So I draw something instead. It’s been a while since I’ve set ink to paper—I used to sketch out all my set designs in detail before I worked on them, but nowadays I work from computer renderings instead. Still, it comes back to me easily enough, with the pen in my hand.

  I draw John, the way I remember him best. Lying beside me in bed, his dark eyes steady and fixed on mine. Reassuring me that whatever happens, he’ll be here for me.

  Just like I’ll be here for him, no matter what happens now. No matter where this news takes the two of us in life.

  When I’m finished, I leave the card sitting open on my dashboard and root around for the card’s envelope. When I find it, I tuck it inside and write on the front in swirling script, John’s name. Then I grab my purse and move to climb out of my car, only to let out a gasp of surprise.

  Bianca is standing outside my car, her eyes huge and round with shock, fixed on me.

  No. Fixed on the card in my hand.

  She moves back as I shove open my door and climb out of the car. I expect her to run away, the way she’s been doing around me ever since the night she hit on John. But she stands her ground, to my surprise, and fixes her attention on the envelope in my hand instead. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry, but I was walking past, and I saw you… you seemed a little ill, so I came to check…” But she doesn’t meet my gaze. She just stares at the envelope in my hand, with John’s name on the front. “Did I read that right?” she asks. “Are you pregnant?”

  The fear and worry I’ve been battling all day turn to jagged rocks in my stomach. I press the card over my heart, like that can shield me. “What do you want?” I snap.

  Her cheeks flush. “I wanted to apologize,” she says, and it’s so far from what I expected that my eyebrows shoot upward.

  “What?”

  She clears her throat, and finally, finally, drags her eyes up to meet mine. “I’m sorry. About what happened with John and me. I’m sure he told you; I was just so embarrassed about it all… I thought he was flirting with me; clearly, I was wrong. I shouldn’t have made a move.” Her eyes drift to the envelope again. “Do you need anything? Can I help somehow?”

  But I shake my head, moving away from her. She may have apologized for hitting on John—for misreading his signals, supposedly—but that doesn’t change the fact that she hit on him after she found out he and I were married. Even if our marriage
was a sham, where is the respect in that?

  And then there’s the last week at work. A whole week where she ignored me, refused to even acknowledge anything had happened. And now she wants to apologize and act like everything is fine… why? Because she found out I’m pregnant? Because she pities me? “I’m fine,” I say coldly, turning toward the building.

  “Good luck,” she calls behind me, but I know her well enough to hear the catch in her tone. The insincerity.

  Screw her. Screw her advice, her telling me that everyone at Pitfire thinks I married John for this job. They don’t know anything, and neither does she.

  Back in the building, I tuck the card into my purse, planning to give it to John later tonight. Once everyone else clears out of the building. For now, I have work to do, and thanks to my much longer than usual morning break at the pharmacy, I’ll be playing catch-up.

  I bypass the workshop for once and head straight into the theater. We’ve been hard at work creating all the pieces for this play, but this week, we’ll be starting to actually assemble the stage itself. It’s an exciting step, usually my favorite part of set design. It’s when all the pieces you’ve labored on so much, all the disparate puzzle pieces stacked up inside your head, finally join together on stage into something that starts to resemble a real theater. It’s when your imagination finally gets to come to life.

  But today, I’m distracted. I force a smile and a wave for Daniel, and chat to a few of our stage hands about the order of setup. I want to get the background design right first, before we start adding the smaller set pieces to it. There’s one in particular, a moving set piece, that I’m worried about making fit. It needs to be suspended over the stage on wires, but accessible, because at one part of the play, toward the end of the second act, it needs to be able to move—to swing into the set, and be sturdy enough for one of the actors to climb onto it. It’s supposed to look like a series of stars in the night sky, at least until it swings down and reveals itself to be a chariot made out of shooting stars.

  It’ll be the trickiest part of our design, but I have faith we can pull it off.

  I leave a couple stage hands, overseen by Daniel, in charge of getting that whole thing hooked into the strap and pulley system we designed to hoist it up. We’ll test it a couple of times, before we hoist it all the way into position.

  In the meantime, I get started helping some other employees prop up the background itself. When I get in, they’re already halfway done hanging the various deer antler designs John and I sculpted by hand onto what will become the back wall of the cabin where most of the first act takes place.

  My heart skips a little, touching those pieces again. Remembering the way John’s hands cupped the clay around mine, the way he shaped them alongside me… And the way he pushed them aside to run his hands over me afterward, until it felt like he was sculpting me too, tracing my body until it became real, as molded as the clay we’d been working with.

  I’m lost in memories of that, of his hands over mine, guiding mine, or letting me guide him, both in equal measure, when I hear raised voices. I finish attaching the set of antlers I’d been working on to its place on the back wall of the “cabin,” and then turn to spot Bianca passing out the usual round of afternoon coffees to the crew. I hadn’t seen her do this in a while. It makes me pause, uncertain.

  Maybe I was being too harsh on her earlier, ignoring her olive branch of an apology. But I just don’t trust her. Not after everything she did.

  I’m about to turn away, back to my work, when I hear a shout, from the opposite side of the stage this time. I whip around and spot Daniel barking angry orders at one of the guys he was supervising. The guy is swearing, grabbing at a rope… My eyes trace the rope up, widening with every foot they travel into the rafters.

  Oh, shit.

  They hoisted the chariot already. Even though I told them to be sure to only test it a few feet off the ground first. To judge by Daniel’s cursing, he didn’t order this either. But there’s no time to worry about whose fault it is, because when my eyes trace the trajectory of the chariot, I realize what’s about to happen.

  The ropes it’s tied to are fraying. The wooden construction is heavier than we wagered. And standing right beneath it, in the path of the thing that’s about to collapse onto her oblivious head, is Bianca, a stack of coffee in hand.

  I don’t pause to think about it. I react on sheer instinct. I sprint across the stage. Somewhere behind me, I hear more shouts, even a scream. That’s enough to finally catch Bianca’s attention and make her whip around to look at me, eyes widening. Then she looks up, and now she has the sense to scream too, just before I collide with her.

  The force of my body crashing into her sends the coffees flying out of her hands and splashing across the stage. It also sends both of us toppling to the ground, just as, with a deafening snap, the chariot’s rope finally gives way.

  We hit the ground, Bianca beneath me. My head flies past hers though, cracks against the wood of the stage. I have just enough consciousness left to hear a deafening splinter as the chariot lands on the stage too, inches from us. Then the world spins and swirls into star bursts, before it fades to black.

  14

  John

  I’m on my way back from lunch break when my phone starts to ring. It’s the office, though a line I don’t recognize. Not any of my usual secretaries. I pick up, only to hear a harried, familiar male voice on the other end. Daniel.

  “Get in here, right now,” he says. “It’s your wife.”

  If I’d been holding anything, I would have dropped it. As it is, I barely manage to hang onto my phone. I’d just parked my car, and I fly out of it now, not bothering to lock it behind me as I sprint toward Pitfire. Belatedly, I register the vehicle parked out front, lights flashing.

  An ambulance.

  Fuck.

  Not Mara. Please, let her be safe.

  I take the steps two at a time, and once I’m inside the building, I break into a flat out run toward the main stage. It’s where Mara was supposed to be all day today, starting to put together the set she’s been painstakingly preparing in pieces up until now. I know how excited she was about today. How much she enjoys putting a set together like this.

  What’s happened to ruin it?

  I reach the theater and yank open the double doors at the back, only to nearly collide with a stretcher rolling out of the main entrance. My stomach sinks straight through my shoes and down into the floor. Lying across that stretcher, her eyes shut, an IV stuck into her arm… “Mara!” My voice breaks on that one word.

  A paramedic grabs my arm, pulls me back. “Sir, we need to get through.”

  “That’s my wife,” I bark.

  His grip on my arm relaxes a little, and his expression shifts to one of understanding. “She’s all right, Mr. Walloway. It looks like just a concussion, but we’re going to need to run some tests.”

  My gaze darts from her unconscious form to the stretcher, and then follows the thought out to the stage behind her. “What happened?” I bark, and my question isn’t so much directed at the paramedic anymore as it is at the cluster of my employees scattered around the stage. I spot Bianca, pacing back and forth, her head in her hands, her whole body shaking. Near her, but not quite touching her, Daniel is holding something—a frayed piece of rope. There’s wood in splinters all across the stage.

  My stomach sinks. The wreckage looks bad. Was Mara in the middle of that?

  The paramedic is handing me something. A card, with an address. “Follow us with her things,” he says, and only when he says that do I register other things scattered across the stage. Mara’s purse, a recognizable lump near the side of the stage, almost as if she dropped it in a panic and bolted. “Your wife is going to be fine, I promise.”

  It’s an empty promise, I know. Nobody can promise that for anyone else. But still, it does relax me, just a little, to glance past this competent man toward my wife prone on her stretcher, with those words in
my ears. She’s going to be fine, I repeat to myself, before I finally relax my hold on the paramedic and let him go to do his job. Let him take care of my Mara.

  In the meantime, feeling less than useless, I pace toward the stage, glaring at everyone in my path.

  “Explain what happened,” I bark when I reach the stage itself. I grimace, looking at the wreckage. It looks like some wooden contraption fell from a height. It probably even damaged the floorboards of the stage itself. Fuck. This is going to be expensive. But as long as Mara is all right, that’s all I care about.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” Daniel is saying, as I cross behind him to scoop up Mara’s things. Her purse. Her wallet. Some other items, including an envelope, that fell out of the purse itself.

  I pause mid-gathering to glance at him. He holds up a frayed rope to demonstrate.

  “It looks like somebody tampered with this. Cut part of the line to weaken it. But… who would do that?” Daniel’s frown deepens.

  But my gaze drifts past him, to where Bianca is sitting on the edge of the stage, rocking back and forth, her head in her hands, moaning a little. Suspicion crystalizes in my gut. I cross toward her, still holding Mara’s things. When I get close enough, I can hear what Bianca’s muttering under her breath.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt her; I didn’t. I just wanted to scare her… Just a scare, that’s all…”

  With a scowl, I plant myself next to her, arms crossed. “Why,” I say, loud enough to make Bianca jump and spin around, her eyes wide and fixed on me. “Why did you do this,” I repeat, gesturing over my shoulder toward Daniel and the frayed rope he’s holding.

  Bianca stares at me, then him, and for a moment, I think she’s going to deny it. Play dumb. It would probably come naturally to her. But then her throat works with a hard swallow, and she bows her head. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she whispers into her lap.