The Wife and the Widow

by Christian White

  ‘There was nothing like that.’

  ‘Are you sure though? Because – and no offence, Kate – you can be pretty fucking vague. Passive to the point of invisible. Christ, I need a cigarette. I hate that you can’t smoke in here.’

  Kate drew her lips tightly together and tried to ignore him. He was worried about his son and projecting his anxiety onto her. But his words stuck. Passive to the point of invisible. Wasn’t that how John liked her?

  The officer cleared his throat impatiently and asked, ‘Do you or your husband own a caravan, cabin, holiday home, unoccupied rental property, anything like that?’

  ‘We have a holiday house on Belport Island,’ she said, feeling Fisher’s eyes on the back of her head. ‘But John wouldn’t go there. He doesn’t like the island.’

  ‘Strange place to buy if your husband doesn’t like the island.’

  ‘We didn’t,’ she said. ‘The house was a wedding gift from John’s parents.’

  ‘We summered there when John was a kid,’ Fisher said.

  The officer leaned back in his squeaky office chair and whistled. ‘Wow. All I got on my wedding day was a serving platter and a couple of toasters.’

  Neither Kate nor Fisher found that particularly funny; that, at least, they could agree on.

  ‘Do you have any suspicion that your husband may have been abducted or harmed by someone else?’

  ‘Not exactly…’ she said.

  ‘Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt him?’ the officer asked. ‘Does he have any enemies? Anyone he doesn’t get along with?’

  Fisher drew in a tight breath to begin a fresh rant, but the officer put up his hand to silence him.

  ‘I’m asking Mrs Keddie,’ he said, then turned to Kate to wait for an answer.

  ‘No,’ she told him. ‘Everyone loves John. He’s very warm, and charming. He’s the dinner party guest everyone wants to be seated next to.’

  ‘So, you believe it’s more likely he left on his own?’

  ‘He wouldn’t leave without telling anyone,’ Fisher said. ‘He wouldn’t do that to Mia.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that to me,’ Kate said.

  Fisher said nothing. The officer’s eyes shone blue in the glow of his monitor.

  ‘How would you categorise your marriage?’ he asked Kate.

  ‘How would I categorise it?’

  ‘Do you consider it successful?’ he offered.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but her throat was suddenly dry. When she thought of her marriage, she had once pictured a stunning home perched on a vast, cliff-side estate. Now she saw the same house, held up by hollow stumps, rotting and infested with termites, leaning closer to the cliff edge each day.

  ‘Happy,’ she said. ‘I’d categorise our marriage as happy.’

  There’s that word again, she thought, reaching between her feet. She lifted the gym bag she’d brought onto the table and unzipped it.

  The officer cocked an eyebrow. ‘What’s in the bag?’

  ‘I read online that you’d want to seize John’s electronic equipment and get a sample of his DNA. I brought his iPad, toothbrush, comb and a couple of old razor blades I found under the bathroom sink. I don’t really know how DNA works, but hopefully you can get something off them. I used gloves when I put them in the bag.’

  He tilted his head and drew his lips together as if to say, aw, how sweet. ‘Someone will be in touch if those items become necessary. Just hang on to them for now.’

  Kate zipped up the bag, feeling foolish. She put her hands under the table and dug her nails into her knees.

  ‘What happens now?’ Fisher asked. ‘Will you put out an amber alert?’

  ‘We only use amber alerts for missing children,’ he said. ‘This report will be entered into our system, and circulated and checked against ambulance and hospital reports.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘From what you’ve told me, there’s nothing to suggest foul play. Generally speaking, an absent spouse who hasn’t committed a crime or an adult who simply hasn’t been in touch for a while is usually categorised as low risk.’

  ‘Low risk?’ Fisher snapped. ‘Low risk? He’s my son!’

  ‘Fisher, please,’ Kate said. ‘Panicking isn’t productive.’

  ‘Neither is sitting around doing nothing.’

  ‘Look,’ the officer said. ‘In most cases like this, the missing person turns up on their own within a day or two. In the meantime, reach out to his friends and family, check if anyone has heard from him, maybe ask around at any haunts he might have, like a gym or local pub. But if I were you, I’d start by figuring out why he quit his job.’

  * * *

  The Trinity Health Centre for Palliative Care was an expansive, glass-fronted building surrounded by lawns and native gardens, walled in by a tall, immaculately manicured hedge that kept out the sounds of the city. It was a peaceful place, John had often said, despite – or perhaps because of – all the people who came here to die. Kate didn’t find it all that peaceful. At best, it gave her the creeps. At worst, like today, it felt haunted.

  She hadn’t told Fisher she was coming here. If she had, he would have insisted on coming, and Kate wasn’t sure how much more time she could spend with him before blowing her top.

  She parked her Lexus at the far end of the car park, alongside a small wooden yurt with Prayer Room printed neatly above the door. The yurt was connected to the main building via a glass tunnel. Kate followed it into a large reception area painted in calming shades of blue and green, decorated with inoffensive, introspective artwork.

  Standing in the middle of the lobby was a bubbling Japanese-style water feature. It sometimes made her wonder where poor people went to die, because they sure as hell couldn’t afford to come here.

  A slim man in his twenties bobbed around behind the front counter, dressed in a tailored grey suit and black turban. He looked up with a gentle smile when Kate approached. When he saw who it was, the smile faded. ‘Kate, hello, I’m surprised to see you.’

  ‘Hi, Chatveer,’ she said. ‘Is Holly in?’

  ‘Is she expecting you?’

  ‘It’ll only take a few minutes.’

  He drummed his fingers lightly on the desk, looked down the brightly lit corridor that led into the centre, then turned back. ‘Can I offer some advice, Kate, as a friend?’

  Are we friends? she wondered.

  ‘Holly told me about the…’ he paused, chose his words carefully, ‘… miscommunication between you and John, and she doesn’t want to get involved. And honestly, you don’t want to get her involved. Talk to John about this. Believe me, it’ll be better for everyone that way.’

  ‘I would if I could,’ Kate said. ‘But John’s missing.’

  The words were sharp, jagged things inside her mouth.

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘I haven’t seen or talked to him in three days. There must be a reason he didn’t tell me he resigned from this place, and there might be a connection between that and wherever the hell he is. Please.’

  He nodded once. ‘I’ll get Holly.’

  * * *

  Holly Cutter sat Kate down at one of the tables in the cafeteria and offered her a green tea. When Kate declined, Holly made herself one at a station in the corner.

  A skeleton crew of staff cleared tables, polished cutlery and tried to make themselves look busy. Two middle-aged women – Kate guessed they were sisters – sat close to the serving area, two black coffees and a half-eaten sandwich between them. One of the women was crying, the other was staring into the garden through a rain-streaked bank of windows that ran along the far wall.

  Kate thought about what the duty sergeant had said: this really was a depressing place to spend your nine-to-five. John rarely talked about his work and Kate rarely asked. Working in palliative care wasn’t like other jobs. When he got home at the end of the day, it didn’t feel right to say cheerily, Hi, honey, how was your day? When friends and family asked John about h
is work, he usually changed the subject quickly. For those few who pressed the subject, he had half a dozen meaningless clichés cocked and loaded in the chamber: It feels good to give something back; a lot of people don’t have anyone else; being around so much death just reminds you how precious life is.

  Kate had figured he’d talk if he wanted to, but now she wondered if he had been protecting her from something. Was this one of the monsters they hadn’t talked about?

  Holly returned, sat across from Kate and immediately looked at her watch.

  ‘I don’t have a lot of time,’ she said.

  ‘I only have two questions,’ Kate said. ‘I need to know why John resigned, and why he kept it from me.’

  Holly frowned. ‘I’m not sure I can help you with the latter, but I might be able to explain the former. John’s resignation was my idea.’

  ‘You fired him?’

  ‘No. I pointed out what was at stake if he stayed.’ She steeped her teabag, twirled it on its string, then set it aside on the table. It landed with a wet thud. ‘John was doing good work here, and it was a shame to lose him. He was great with patients, the staff loved him and his research was yielding some very positive results. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that.’

  ‘No,’ Kate lied. John hadn’t mentioned anything to her about research.

  ‘I was very sorry to see him go,’ Holly said. ‘But I would have been sorrier if he stayed.’

  ‘What does that mean, exactly?’

  ‘Has John ever talked to you about spiritual distress?’ Holly asked.

  Kate shook her head.

  ‘That doesn’t really surprise me. It’s a difficult concept to explain if you’re not in the business. John was as much a counsellor here as he was a physician. It’s like that, working in palliative care. We don’t heal. We guide. But it doesn’t really matter how comfortable you make a terminal patient; the end result is always the same. The trick is to help them find peace before the end.

  ‘In the West we have a pretty messed up relationship with death,’ she continued. ‘We spend our lives trying not to think about it, yet at the same time we hold out hope that when the time finally does come, we’ll somehow be at peace with it. Our philosophy seems to be, We’ll deal with it when it happens. But that’s rarely the case. More often than not, when people are close to the end, they talk about a sort of … void.’

  ‘A void?’

  Holly nodded and looked down at her fingers, as if they were alien entities.

  ‘There’s a lot of sadness in this place, Kate, but there’s a lot more anger, a lot more guilt. As Medical Director, I no longer get to do much practical medicine, but I still spend a lot of time talking to our patients. To the ones well enough to talk, anyway. Sometimes we talk about the weather or music they like or who’s winning the cricket. Then sometimes they say things like, God feels very far away from this place or What did I do to deserve this? They talk about a lack of peace. That’s spiritual distress.’

  Kate remained silent and waited for her to continue.

  ‘When you’ve been in the business long enough you get pretty good at diagnosing it. Sometimes you can see it just by looking in someone’s face. Their eyes turn a couple of shades darker. Usually it’s something you see in your patients, but every now and then, you see it in your staff.’

  ‘Are you saying John was in spiritual distress?’

  ‘I’m saying that seven months ago, I noticed his eyes turn a couple of shades darker.’

  ‘What happened seven months ago?’

  Holly offered a small robotic shrug and whispered, almost to herself, ‘The dam swelled.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Working in this sort of environment is emotionally taxing,’ Holly said. ‘So, we practise something here called leaves on a stream. It’s a quick form of self-therapy designed to disentangle yourself from negative thoughts. The idea is to visualise a stream, take each negative thought and place it on a leaf, put the leaf in the stream and let it drift away. But there’s only so many leaves you can place in that stream before it forms a dam.’

  ‘And that’s what happened with John? He was … stressed?’

  ‘People who work in law firms and design agencies get stressed. People who work in palliative care get distressed.’

  Kate shook her head, feeling frustrated. She had come here for answers, but all Holly was giving her were metaphors and euphemisms. Kate wanted to slap her, to tell her to just talk like a human being, but instead she took a breath and asked, ‘What was the leaf that dammed the stream?’

  Holly leaned back in her chair and sipped her green tea. ‘Did John ever mention Annabel?’

  Kate shook her head.

  ‘Annabel was John’s patient. Mid-sixties – far too young to be in here. Advanced stages of PF – pulmonary fibrosis. It’s a chronic and degenerative disease where lung tissue becomes scarred and stiff, which makes it hard to breathe and get enough oxygen into the bloodstream. There’s no cure and plenty of causes. She’d been undergoing radiation treatment for lung cancer. She was a smoker. The radiation killed the cancer, but it gave her PF. The universe can be cruel sometimes. Annabel and John were very fond of each other. You’re not supposed to have favourites, but sometimes you find someone you just click with, and when that happens, it’s impossible not to feel their passing.’

  ‘And that’s what happened?’

  ‘When Annabel died, John took a dark turn,’ Holly said, nodding. ‘This sort of thing is accumulative, but if I had to trace it back, Annabel’s death was the leaf that dammed the stream. After that, he became distant. Cold. He started eating lunch in his car, snapping at the nursing staff. A wall went up.’

  ‘What happened next?’ Kate asked.

  ‘I reminded him I was here to talk, but if his work performance kept suffering, then we’d need to have a more serious conversation. He handed in his resignation letter the following day.’

  Guilt drifted in like a bank of fog. Kate’s husband had been in distress and, somehow, she hadn’t noticed.

  Passive to the point of invisible, Fisher had called her. The accuracy of it stung. It wasn’t just with John either: she had been that woman at work, was maybe still that woman in her friendship groups and on the school council – working to realise other people’s bold visions. She was the agreeable assistant, the easy-going supporter, the designated driver. It kept her safe. It meant that she had spent the better part of the past two decades living inside a cocoon. It was a comfortably appointed cocoon, warm and safe, and she would have been happy to stay there forever. But since the airport, since the police station, since hearing John mourned the loss of a woman she never knew existed, the walls of her cocoon had been weakening. What would emerge from within?

  ‘Try to understand,’ Holly said. ‘People don’t usually leave a job in palliative care because they get promoted or a better offer. They leave because if they stay, it will consume them. I didn’t want John to leave, but I didn’t want that for him, either.’

  The middle-aged women by the window stood, hugged each other for a long moment, then started slowly back towards the wards.

  ‘Where do you think he is, Holly?’ Kate asked. ‘Where do people with spiritual distress go?’

  She offered another robotic shrug and glanced at her watch again. Kate had got all that she was going to find here, and it didn’t feel like much.

  She pictured the banks of a stream, swollen and flooded with dead leaves. Then she saw herself slipping under the water.

  4

  THE WIFE

  Abby rolled onto her back and pulled the covers tight against the morning chill. Ray stirred bedside her. With a heavy yawn, he swung his feet out of bed and rubbed his face with his big hands. Ray kept his own hours and was often loose with the whole nine-to-five thing, so it was unusual for him to get up so early.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Abby asked. ‘I need my bedwarmer.’

  ‘I did some work a
t Lance and Sally Thinner’s place last week and I think I forgot to close the damn storm windows. That wind was pretty savage last night. I won’t relax until I get over there to check for damage.’

  ‘Is that the place with the outdoor sauna?’

  ‘Sauna and steam room,’ he said. ‘Apparently those are different things.’

  Ray’s caretaking business serviced nearly half the properties on the island. Along with general yard maintenance and storm damage repair, he kept driveways and gutters free of dead leaves, yards clear of fallen branches or downed trees, alarm systems in working order, and watched for squatters and break-ins.

  Secured in a lock-box on the floor of his truck were the keys and alarm codes for all the homes he managed. But as Ray was fond of reminding her, strolling around big empty houses wasn’t as glamorous as Abby thought. He said most days he felt like Jack Nicholson roaming the halls of that eerie hotel, keeping an eye out for the ghosts of dead children.

  ‘Let’s hope you don’t go crazy and kill your family with a roque mallet,’ Abby once told him.

  ‘I thought he used an axe,’ he had said.

  ‘It’s a roque mallet in the book. They changed it for the movie.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  Abby smiled at the memory as Ray stood with a grunt and found the work shirt he’d laid out over the back of the wingback armchair in the corner the night before. He buttoned it quickly against the icy air. The fire downstairs kept the house warm during the evenings, but as well as Abby stoked it, the embers always went out overnight.

  ‘Jesus,’ he hissed. ‘It’s freezing. My bloody fingers aren’t working.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  She gestured to his chest. He looked down. He’d buttoned his shirt wrong. Muttering a curse, he started over. ‘You’re working tonight, right?’

  ‘Graveyard shift, so don’t wait up.’

  ‘Like ships passing in the night then,’ he said.

  When he drifted out of the room, a little warmth went with him. She listened to his footfalls down the hallway and out the front door, heard his work truck rattle and moan to life, pull out onto Milt Street and fade into the distance. Then there were just the flame robins chirping outside the window.