The Betrayed Wife

by Kevin O'Brien

  “I know,” she said, drawing the curtains in the dining room. “She’s definitely off her rocker, as my dear mother used to say. I guess we don’t have to wonder anymore who wrecked our garden.” She picked up the pizza boxes and the plates and took them into the kitchen. “Listen, Stevie, my head is suddenly splitting. I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down for a little while—just a few minutes. Will you be all right by yourself down here?”

  He nodded. “Is it okay if I look at Eden’s pictures?”

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind,” Sheila said. “There aren’t too many of Eden. But let me know if you recognize anyone.” She glanced toward the window. “And come get me if you hear anything more from the dirtball lady.”

  Up in her bedroom, Sheila closed the drapes, kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the bed.

  She believed every word that crazy woman had just said.

  Poor Eden. Between seeing her father copulating with a neighbor and then having her stepmother slap a drink out of her hand—after proposing a toast—small wonder the girl had run away tonight.

  Sheila kept thinking, How could he?

  Less than a week after learning that he’d fathered an illegitimate child who was now grown and turning their lives upside down, Dylan was screwing the next-door neighbor, some basket case he’d already been with years back. She wasn’t even pretty. How could he?

  He hadn’t changed at all in seventeen years.

  Sheila remembered the “rough patch” she’d tried so hard to forget.

  Forget and forgive, forgive and forget. That was what the priest friend of her mother’s had told her.

  She recalled that hot July night, after finding her frail, sickly mother abandoned and lying in her own feces in the bathroom. Sheila was still feeling nauseated from perpetual morning sickness. And she’d finally had it out with her useless, self-centered sister. She remembered Molly with tears streaming down her pretty face and her blond hair blowing in the wind. She stood on the other side of the security railing on the rooftop deck of their mother’s apartment building, the blazing red sunset behind her. Sheila had turned her back to her.

  She started to walk away. Then, past the noise from the roof ’s air-conditioning vents and the distant traffic below, she heard her sister call to her a second time. “Sheila, please, wait.”

  If only she’d kept walking back into the building and that rooftop gym, how different things might have been. But Sheila stopped and turned around.

  “You’re right,” Molly cried, her hands gripping the railing in front of her. “I’m a terrible sister. I don’t blame you for hating me. I hate myself. But it’s not my fault. You can’t choose who you fall in love with.”

  Sheila tried to remember the name of the guy who had graduated that year, the one her roommate had said Molly was crazy for—so crazy that she’d swallowed all those sleeping pills and ended up in the hospital. Sheila shook her head. “Are you talking about—what’s his name—Jesse?”

  Molly wiped her eyes. “There’s no Jesse. There was never a Jesse. I made him up. I didn’t want anyone at school to know I was seeing a married guy.”

  Sheila remembered holding onto her swollen, extended belly, and somehow knowing what Molly was going to say.

  “This whole year, during almost all of his trips out of town, Dylan’s been seeing me,” Molly admitted. “We’re in love, Sheila. I’m sorry. We didn’t plan on this happening. It’s nobody’s fault. Neither one of us wanted to hurt you.”

  Staring at her, Sheila just shook her head over and over.

  She remembered wanting to kill her.

  But she didn’t remember anything else after that.

  There was a two-hour gap between that moment and when she returned to her and Dylan’s apartment. It was lost time. The drive home should have taken twenty-five minutes. But Sheila didn’t remember leaving her mother’s building or getting into her car.

  According to Dylan, after getting the call from the police, he’d waited and watched from their apartment window until he finally saw her car.

  Sheila didn’t even remember parking the car. But when she saw Dylan come out the front door of their apartment building, it was like she was waking up from an awful dream. His arms out, he slowly approached her. “Honey, I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

  She didn’t hug him back. She realized Molly must have been telling the truth. She figured her sister must have called and told him about their discussion on the rooftop deck. That explained why he was apologizing. Sheila stood, stiff in his arms, thinking, Does he think he can just hug me and say he’s sorry? Does he really think that’s going to make everything all right again?

  She was about to pull away, but he was holding her tightly.

  “The police just called an hour ago,” he whispered in her ear. “Where have you been? Your mom, the nurse, we’ve all been trying to get ahold of you. There’s been a terrible accident. It’s Molly . . .”

  No one ever actually blamed her. She told the police that she’d had a brief argument with Molly on the rooftop deck. No one actually said anything about her possibly pushing her sister off the edge of that roof, though a couple of newspaper articles may have hinted between the lines. One look at Sheila in her advanced state of pregnancy and the police knew she would have had a hard time climbing over that railing. Besides, she and her sister had argued all their lives. No one had ever ended up dead before.

  Sheila had a vague recollection of wandering along the riverwalk downtown during that lost time. So she told the police that was where she’d been for the unaccounted-for ninety minutes. She said her doctor had prescribed a lot of exercise and walking.

  There was every indication that Molly had leapt to her death. A few of Molly’s college friends had come forward with accounts of other suicide attempts in addition to the incident with the sleeping pills. Apparently, the attempts to kill herself were always over this “Jesse” no one could ever track down.

  Sheila didn’t think she’d ever forgive Dylan. She kept asking him: How could you?

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he confessed to her in the early morning hours after Molly’s death. The police had left and they were finally alone in their apartment. They were both devastated and exhausted. “I’ve never been unfaithful to you, Sheila,” he explained. “I’ve never loved anyone but you. Then about a year and half ago, after your dad died and Molly went away to college, I had that trip to Eugene. Remember? You wanted Molly and me to get together while I was there. But I already knew how she felt about me. She’d been dropping all these hints. Anyway, we got together, got drunk, and—well, it happened. Remember how we didn’t see much of her at all for about a year? I told her that we had to stay away from each other. To Molly’s credit, she agreed. She understood. But then after you got pregnant, she suddenly became clingy and demanding. She kept calling me at work, telling me I had to drive down to see her. She threatened to tell you about us. I couldn’t let that happen. You’ve been going through such an awful time. Hell, it’s been tough on both of us. I thought I could smooth things over with Molly and we could somehow be friends. So I kept seeing her. She threatened to kill herself if I stopped. She tried a couple of times. I didn’t know what to do. I was trying to get out of it gracefully without anyone getting hurt. I’m so sorry, Sheila . . .”

  She didn’t tell the police about Dylan’s affair with Molly. The only person she told was the old priest friend of her mother’s. Of course, he advised her to stay with Dylan and work things out: forget and forgive, forgive and forget. He’d come to her mother’s apartment that week—not only to console her mom about Molly, but also to give her last rites. In the days following Molly’s death, their mother starved herself. She was too frail to attend Molly’s funeral.

  Sheila remembered how Dylan did everything he could to make it up to her. He cried and begged for her forgiveness. He handled Molly’s funeral arrangements and took over the around-the-clock nursing care for her mother. He devote
d himself to helping Sheila heal. Everyone thought he was the best husband in the world.

  Her mother died just a week after Molly was buried. Dylan made all the funeral arrangements again.

  It was at her mom’s funeral that Sheila realized something was wrong with the baby. She started bleeding in the cemetery.

  She lost the child. It was a girl.

  No one understood how she could want to leave her dear, sweet husband, who had been at her side practically the entire time during her hospital stay. Their separation lasted six weeks.

  Looking back on it now, Sheila figured it must have been about two weeks after he’d moved out that he met Antonia. He might have even fooled around with some other women during that brief interim.

  Sheila took him back because she didn’t have anyone else. In a month’s time, she’d lost her sister, her mother, and her baby daughter. She’d also lost her husband, but at least he was still alive. And he was calling every day to tell her how sorry he was, how much he missed her, and how much he still loved her. So Sheila decided to forget and forgive, forgive and forget. To help make that strategy easier, Sheila insisted they move away from Portland.

  By the time they’d settled in Seattle, she was pregnant again.

  She cut Molly out of all the photographs in the family albums, and they never talked about her. But it didn’t really work. It just left a gap. Besides that, she’d forgiven Molly years and years ago.

  It was Dylan she had a hard time completely forgiving.

  That was the first time she found out that he’d been unfaithful. And it had practically killed her.

  But since then, it had happened again and again. She told herself that it was his one flaw. He was a good father, a good lover, a good provider. And despite all the other women, he always came back to her. Yet, even though she turned a blind eye to every affair, it still killed her a little bit each time.

  From the bed, Sheila looked over toward the window. She thought about the house on the other side of those closed curtains. She thought about what Dylan’s long-lost daughter had seen going on in that house today.

  Instead of asking, How could he? she finally had to ask herself, How could you keep taking him back?

  Sheila turned away from the window and cried.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Saturday—9:19 P.M.

  Dodgeball was on the kitchen TV with about a hundred commercials and all the best gross-out gags cut out. But it really didn’t matter. Steve had the TV on mostly for background noise while he sorted through the pile of photos Eden’s mother had saved.

  He was still feeling kind of weird for yelling at that crazy woman next door. Maybe he had a minor case of post-traumatic stress disorder or something. He didn’t like confrontations, especially with adults. Plus, he’d never encountered anyone who had so openly attacked his parents, screaming insults at his mother and badmouthing his dad. He kept thinking of all these clever, cutting things he should have said to her. It was extra disturbing that this nutcase lived right next door. Steve had to resist the urge to peek past the curtains and check on what she was up to in the house across the hedges.

  All that drama had somehow made him hungry, and he’d put away three more slices of pizza while half-watching the movie and looking at the photographs. He was careful not to get any grease on the pictures.

  It was actually pretty boring, going through the photos of some stranger. His mom was right about there being only a few snapshots of Eden, mostly school portraits in which she looked pretty dorky. It was easy to identify Eden’s mother. She was the thin, tan brunette in about ninety-nine percent of the shots. In some of the older photos, Antonia was with a woman who looked like her wannabe twin. They both had on a lot of eye makeup, and their shoulder-length dark hair was kinky-curly. Steve wondered if the lookalike gal-pal in those pictures was Eden’s “other mother,” Cassandra. She wasn’t quite as pretty or flashy-looking as Antonia. Steve looked for names on the backs of the photos, but all he found was an occasional notation with the month and year. The photos ranged from 1997 through 2002. Antonia looked pregnant in a couple of the pictures. There were about a dozen shots of this other woman with Antonia, and Steve set them aside. He couldn’t find any current pictures of her.

  Steve wished that the photo collection was more interesting. He really wanted to take his mind off what that crazy woman had said about his dad. If he’d heard those awful accusations before last week, he’d have quickly dismissed them. But since Eden had come into their lives, Steve had a whole different, slightly dismaying view of his dad. He couldn’t help wondering if there was some truth in the ridiculous things that lady had said.

  And what the hell was happening at the police station? His dad had said he’d be home by nine at the latest.

  Steve’s phone rang, and he dug it out from under a pile of photos he’d viewed. He saw on the Caller ID that it was Eden. He clicked on the phone. “Hey, where are you?” he asked.

  “Well, I’ve pretty much run away, so answering that question would kind of defeat the purpose of the whole thing, y’know?”

  She could be just as sarcastic as Hannah at times.

  “Listen, my mom’s really sorry about that thing with the bourbon,” Steve explained. “Somebody put ground-up glass in the bottle, and she thought it was you. She figured you’d refuse to drink it. But when you almost did, that’s when she slapped the glass out of your hand. See?”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Eden? Are you there?”

  “Somebody put ground glass in her bourbon?”

  “Yeah. They also put Visine in her juice to poison her and short-circuited the washing machine.”

  More silence.

  “Are you there?”

  “Did our father come home yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, have you or your mom let him know that I’ve run away?”

  “I haven’t. I don’t know about my mom. She’s upstairs. We were kind of hoping you’d come back.”

  “Well, I’m not. Could you call our dad and let him know I’m sorry?”

  “Listen, just come home, okay?” Steve let out a nervous sigh. “Did you see our dad with the woman next door this afternoon?”

  “Yeah, I saw them. Why are you asking?”

  “She came by here a little while ago. She said the two of them were getting it on in her dining room, and you saw them. Is that true?”

  “Yeah,” she muttered. “Dylan tried to convince me that she, like, tried to rape him or something. He said she attacked him and pulled down his pants. I guess it’s possible. But to me, it sure looked like he was screwing her.”

  Steve slumped a bit in the breakfast booth. “Well, thanks for being honest,” he mumbled. He wondered if there was any truth to his father’s explanation. Steve wouldn’t have put it past the woman to sexually attack his father. At the same time, he wouldn’t have put it past his father to mess around with that woman, even if she was kind of a skank.

  “Will you give that message to our dad for me?” Eden asked.

  “That you’re sorry you ran away?” Steve said. “Won’t you please just come back? We have your special vegan pizza here—and pictures. My mom went down to Portland today and got all these photographs that your mom had saved.”

  “Well, she had no business taking my mother’s stuff,” Eden said. “What’s she planning to do with the pictures?”

  “I think she was going to surprise you or something. I don’t know. Why are you wigging out about it?”

  “I’m not wigging out. It’s nothing. Forget it.”

  “You know that Cassandra woman you told me about? Is she alive or dead?”

  “She moved to Florida. Why are you asking about her?”

  “Did she kind of look like your mom at one time—I mean, like around a year or so before you were born?”

  Again, there was silence on the other end of the line.

  “Eden?”

 
; “I really wish you’d run away with me when I asked you earlier tonight. This isn’t how I wanted it to turn out. I’m sorry about everything. Anyway, be sure to call Dad and tell him I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t get this,” Steve said. “Why don’t you just call him yourself?”

  “Because I’d rather he hear it from you,” she answered. “Listen, earlier tonight in the kitchen, your mom was worried about me walking on the glass, and she called me ‘honey.’ Is that what she calls you sometimes?”

  “Yeah, sometimes,” Steve replied. “She calls all of us that sometimes—Hannah, Gabe, and me.”

  “Neither one of those bitches who raised me ever called me that—at least, never in a nice way,” Eden muttered. “I do feel bad about your mom. I feel bad about this whole thing. Listen, I’m sorry, okay? It—it would have been nice having you for a brother.”

  She hung up.

  *

  Leah Engelhardt realized she’d left her back door ajar. She’d been up and down the block in the rain, looking for her German shepherd, calling for her. She even brought along a box of Milk-Bones and shook it as she walked down the street. She’d discovered that the sound of the rattling dog biscuits quickly brought Trudy out of hiding. It was one of the cute little things she’d learned about the dog in the short time she’d owned her. But the rattling box of Milk-Bones hadn’t worked this time. Trudy was still missing.

  Stepping inside the house, Leah shut and locked the door behind her. She set the box of dog biscuits and the leash on the kitchen counter. Peeling off her damp jacket, she threw it over the back of the chair at her breakfast table.

  It had been nearly an hour since she’d confronted Dylan’s pathetic wife and their snot-nosed son. Part of Leah was still riding on that high. She’d felt exhilarated telling Sheila O’Rourke about the affair with Dylan, finally getting it out in the open like that. She could tell Sheila remembered the black roses, too. Leah wished she’d had a camera to capture the look on Sheila’s face when she told her about Dylan having sex with her this afternoon. Hell, it was even more satisfying than destroying the bitch’s garden had been.