Dear Wife

by Kimberly Belle

  “Look, if it makes you feel any better, we didn’t want you to find out like this. Sabine was going to tell you to your face this weekend. Ask her—she’ll tell you we had it all planned out. She was going to tell you the right way.”

  “The right way. What in the fucking hell could possibly be the right way?”

  Now that the dog’s calm, he settles the thing on the floor. “By telling you that we’re in love. That we want to be together. I know that hurts to hear, and believe me, we’ve struggled with it ourselves, but—”

  I throw back my head and shout hard enough to burn the back of my throat, “She’s married, you asshole!” The words bounce around the house, then fall into a silence so absolute it rings in my ears.

  “I understand that, Jeffrey, and I’m sorry. Truly. You can’t even imagine how sorry. But swear to God, Sabine and I didn’t set out intending to break up two families. It just happened, and this isn’t just some fling. This is the realest, most genuine thing I’ve ever felt. Sabine is my soul mate. I love her. I adore her. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  His speech might have worked on another man. His words might have been a balm on a brittle, broken heart. Sabine will be loved, cared for, cherished. He’s not stealing her out of greed or spite, but because he has no choice, because their connection is too great to ignore. Only an asshole stands in the way of soul mates.

  But we’ve already established that I am a bitter, bitter man.

  “Well then, Trevor, I feel obliged to tell you that this woman you cherish so much? Your soul mate?” The fur bag sniffs at my shoe, and I push it away with a foot. “She’s missing.”

  Trevor makes a face like I punched him in his perfectly sculpted abs. “What do you mean, Sabine is missing? Missing, missing?”

  I nod. “She had a showing last night—”

  “With Corey Porter and his family, I know.”

  The doctor stops, waiting for me to continue, but I’m still processing the fact that he knows more about my wife’s business than I do, than even Ingrid does. As much as I’d love to leave him hanging, I need to know what he knows. I fix him with a defiant stare. “She never came home.”

  “She never...” He swallows the rest, but his expression is screaming the words.

  “Came home. Sabine never came home. She didn’t show up, and neither did her car.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s think about this logically. I mean, she was pretty sure Corey would pull the trigger on the house. Maybe he did. Maybe they went out after to celebrate.”

  “Maybe. But now it’s the next day.”

  “Did you call her?”

  I sigh. Roll my eyes.

  “Of course you called her. But, but...” Trevor runs a shaking hand through his hair. “What about Ingrid—did you call her? Did you call the police?”

  “Yes to both. Ingrid was at my house when the detective got there. He was going to check out the show house, see if he saw anything out of the ordinary. That was hours ago.”

  Trevor’s eyes go wide with fear, with horror. “Oh my God. Oh my God.” He stumbles into the kitchen, and I follow behind. I step on one of the dog’s squeaky toys, and the beast comes running.

  Trevor leans against the kitchen counter, tapping numbers into a cordless phone with his thumb. He presses the phone to his ear, muttering, “Come on, come on, come on.” And then his shoulders slump, and he curses. “Babe, it’s me. Jeffrey’s here, and he said you never came home last night. Wherever you are, please call me, okay? The very second you get this. I need to know you’re okay, that you’re... I’m scared shitless. I love you. Call me.”

  He hangs up, and I almost feel sorry for the bastard.

  He begins pacing, his bare feet slapping the hardwood floor. “Now what?” Under the kitchen can lights, his face is green and shiny, sweating despite the air-conditioning. “What are we going to do now?”

  I shake my head, battling a rush of disgust at his use of the word we. “You and I are not on the same team here. We do not share Sabine. She’s my wife. She’s nothing to you.”

  He stops, takes a long, slow breath. “When is the last time you talked to your wife?”

  “Yesterday morning. And then she texted me later in the day that she had a showing but she’d be home by nine. When’s the last time you talked to my wife?”

  “Has anybody confirmed that she actually made it to the showing? Did she meet Corey and his wife at the house?”

  I shrug. “Like I said, I haven’t heard anything from the detective, so I’m guessing so. What time—”

  “Did anybody call Corey to ask?”

  “You’re the first person I’ve talked to who knows who the showing was with. The most I could tell the detective was the name of Sabine’s boss.”

  He turns and races from the room, his footsteps crashing up the stairs. While he’s gone, I take a look around, try to see the place like Sabine would, like she did when she showed it to her soon-to-be lover. I picture her leading him through the empty house, pointing out all the features. Open, rambling rooms with French doors and generous windows. A spacious kitchen with new stainless appliances. Custom molding and hardwood floors throughout. Was their first kiss under the arched doorway? Did he push her up against these granite countertops? The visions burn like acid in my eyes, and I rub them away.

  The floor creaks above my head.

  I open the fridge and study the contents. Definitely a doctor’s refrigerator. Milk, fruit, yogurt, enough vegetables to stock a produce department. Nothing even remotely unhealthy except a lone IPA, shoved to the very back behind a container of organic pineapple. I’m digging it out when Trevor returns with a shirt, thank God, and his cell.

  “Corey’s not answering his phone,” he tells me, “and neither is Lisa.”

  I shut the refrigerator and wave the beer in the air by my head. “Where do you keep your opener?”

  Trevor ignores me, staring at the phone in his hand.

  The first drawer I try is stuffed with pencils and Post-its, so I close it and keep going, moving down the island, opening and closing the drawers in search of a bottle opener. On the third try, I find one, a golf-themed piece of plastic that makes a cheering sound when I open the cap. I toss it back into the drawer mid-hurrah.

  “You never answered my question,” I say. “When is the last time you talked to Sabine?”

  He looks up, and his eyes are liquid. “She came by the hospital yesterday afternoon. She wasn’t there very long, only fifteen minutes or so. She left around one thirty.”

  I stare at him across the island. At one thirty yesterday afternoon, I was in Little Rock, fretting about the canyon that’s cracked down the middle of my marriage and plotting the steps I can take to win my wife back, oblivious to the fact that she was more than likely being fucked by her lover in a hospital supply closet.

  “Would you stop looking at me like that?” he says. “Sabine is missing.”

  “It’s just that I’m having trouble letting go of the fact that she made time in her day to go to the hospital for fifteen minutes with you, when she can never squeeze in a lunch with me. She’s hardly ever home for dinner!”

  Trevor sinks onto a stool at the counter, shoving aside a coloring book and a Solo cup packed with colorful markers. “What about her car? Has anyone seen it?”

  “Not that I know of. Ingrid gave the detective her license plate number, though, so I’m assuming he’s on the lookout.” I take a long pull from the bottle, then make a face. It’s one of those snobby IPAs, bitter and aggressively hoppy. I check the label and see it’s also organic. “Do you have any normal beer?”

  Trevor plucks a blue marker from the cup. “What’s his name?”

  “Whose name?”

  “The detective. What’s his name?”

  “Oh. Something Durand. Mike or Mark or something like that.”

  I pour the rest of the IPA down the drain while Trevor calls 9-1-1 and demands to be put through to the detective.
He uses his doctor’s voice, polite but overly self-important, each word delivered in a tone that commands attention. He introduces himself—Dr. Trevor McAdams, Chief Obstetrician at Jefferson Regional, romantically involved with Sabine for the past five months—then rattles off Corey’s name and number. Sabine’s schedule until the moment she left the hospital, at sometime around one thirty. Her cell plus another number I didn’t know existed, for a phone I didn’t know she had. The entire conversation lasts no longer than five minutes. He thanks the person and hangs up.

  I slam the bottle onto the counter with a clap, and the dog, who’d curled into a sleepy ball on its bed by the table, looks up with a start. “Five months?”

  Trevor frowns.

  “You told the detective just now that you and Sabine have been romantically involved for five fucking months.” Those were his words, “romantically involved.” The beer turns to acid in my throat.

  “Like I said, this isn’t the way we wanted you to find out, but can we drop the guilt trip for a minute? At least until Sabine is found.”

  I grip the granite with both hands. “Five months ago, Sabine started to cringe whenever I’d touch her. She started turning her head when I kissed her and complaining about headaches any time I reached for her in bed. I thought it was me, but it was you, wasn’t it?”

  Trevor sighs, and he lifts a hand from the counter. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jeffrey.”

  “That phone number you gave the detective just now. Let me guess. Sabine got it when she started seeing you, didn’t she?”

  He doesn’t answer, but his expression tells me it’s a yes. Sabine has a secret phone. She got a separate device so she can talk to Trevor without me knowing. A Trevor hotline.

  He opens the coloring book, scribbles across a smiling Dumbo in bright purple marker. “Corey lives in those gated condos on Old Warren Road. He must know something. I need to know what it is.” He rips out the sheet and holds it across the counter to me, waiting for me to take it. “Please, Jeffrey. My kids are upstairs. I can’t leave them. My wife...” He shakes his head. “She’s already taking me to the cleaners. I can’t have her taking them, too. Please.”

  I sigh, a hard huff filled with resentment and something sharper, something that gnaws at me like hunger—but for revenge. When I get home, I’m going to look up the number for this guy’s wife and volunteer as a witness.

  “You do realize that Sabine leaves her shit all over the house, right? If you actually lived with her, if you spent time with her on a regular basis, you’d know she’s demanding and forgetful and selfish. That she pees with the door open and she hogs the couch and she never bothers cleaning up her own dishes. You don’t want her because she’s your soul mate. You only want her because she’s not yours.”

  He gives the paper a shake. “Please, talk to Corey. Don’t do it for me. Do it for Sabine. For our—” He stops himself just in time, but it’s too late. I already understand. I heard the words he didn’t want to say.

  “You motherfucking fucker.” I pause, the realization lighting me up from inside—hot, smoldering coals that seethe in my stomach and spread outward until my limbs feel like they’re on fire. One good spark, and I’ll blow. “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

  He doesn’t nod, but his eyes are glassy in the dim light.

  Finally, after all these years of wishing and wanting and eventually giving up entirely, Sabine is pregnant. With Trevor’s child.

  His gaze dips to the paper. “Please,” he says, and his voice breaks on the word.

  I take the paper, but then I stalk around the island and punch him in the face.

  BETH

  That night, you come to me in my sleep, a blur of lightning limbs and shouted curses, tearing through the house. Opening and slamming doors, whipping off pillows and bedcovers, flipping couches and tables, ripping pictures off the wall. You are searching for something, for me.

  I teeter on the edge of awake.

  I see you gaining speed, moving closer, and my stomach clenches into a spiky knot. You puff your big chest and scream, and that lock of hair I used to love to run my fingers through falls flat on your sweaty forehead. You push it off with the back of a fist, and that’s when I see the gun.

  Wake up! I pinch the skin of my arms, smack myself on the cheeks. But my legs, tangled in the sheets, are like lead. They won’t move.

  Suddenly, you’re here, stomping down the hallway at Morgan House. The hollow thud of your footsteps trembles the floor, the walls, the lining around my heart. The noise stops in front of my door, and I am frozen with fear, with pure terror.

  My doorknob rattles, then goes still.

  I hold my breath, wait for the gun to go off.

  The door explodes, wood splinters showering down on me like a million deadly spikes. The hallway sconces light you up from behind, glowing underneath your skin like blood.

  I scream.

  You grin and aim the gun.

  * * *

  I shoot upright in my bed, the scream ringing in my ears. I clamp a hand over my mouth and stare into the dark room, trying to get my bearings. My room, my bed at Morgan House. I’m safe. You’re not here. It was only a dream.

  And yet... Was it? The back of my throat burns in a way that tells me the scream might have been real, but the ache could also be from the sobbing. My cheeks are slick, the hair at my temples damp with sweat or tears.

  I mop my face with the sheet and take several deep breaths, willing my hammering heart to slow. I check the time on my cell phone: 4:00 a.m.

  Somewhere above me, a male body is snoring loud enough to rattle the floorboards, and I wonder what this says about my housemates. That they are either deaf or sleep like the dead... Or maybe they are immune to a stranger’s scream ripping through their slumber. Miss Sally runs a tight ship, but this place is an oasis in a questionable neighborhood, one where the houses sport bars on the windows. This doesn’t bode well for me if my nightmare turns to reality. What will they do if you find me here? Sleep through the screams? Hide behind the locked doors of their bedrooms?

  Suddenly, the room is too hot, the four walls shrinking around me. I kick off the twisted sheets and reach for my shorts, in a wadded pile on the floor. I need a glass of water, or maybe a cup of tea if I can swipe a tea bag from somebody’s supply. Mostly, I need to get out of this room. I strap my money belt around my waist, pluck my keys and phone from the nightstand, and creep into the hall, locking the door behind me.

  The hallway is dark, lit only at the far end by a streetlamp somewhere outside the window. I move, breathless and on tiptoe toward its golden gleam, the pads of my bare feet silent on the polyester runner. The stairs are trickier, sagging and creaky in the middle. I hug the side instead, my fingertips skimming the walls, following them to the kitchen.

  A single bulb above the stove casts faint light on the scuffed linoleum floor, but otherwise the room is a black hole. I power on my cell, use the light of the screen to guide the way to the cabinets on the far wall.

  The first one is dinnerware, neat stacks of plates and bowls and plastic cups. I shut it and move down the line. Cleaning supplies, pots and pans, but not a single crumb of food, no box of dusty tea bags.

  “You must be the new girl,” a female voice says from behind me.

  A grenade erupts in my chest, and I whirl around, searching for her face in the darkness.

  The shadows shift, and the ceiling lamp buzzes to life, blinding me with sudden light. I cover my eyes, squinting through my fingers at the woman sitting cross-legged atop the kitchen table. Caramel skin and big brown eyes and the body of a fifties film star, petite but curvy.

  She watches me with barefaced curiosity. “What are you looking for? Maybe I can help you find it.”

  She’s as pretty as her accent, a South American cadence slowed with a Southern drawl. Two silver discs hang on delicate chains from her neck, each of them engraved with something I can’t quite make out from this distance. Names, I’m guessing
.

  I wasn’t expecting to find anyone here, not when the money belt hanging from my middle is about as subtle as a third breast. I pull on my too-tight T-shirt, fold my arms across my waist. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “Was that you upstairs?” She pauses. “I heard somebody scream just now. Was that you?”

  Shit. So that part wasn’t a dream.

  My face goes hot, thinking of all the sleeping bodies upstairs. “Sorry. Did I wake you?” How many others did I rouse from their slumber?

  “No. My room is right next to Ned’s.” She points to the ceiling, the boards above our head rumbling like a faraway train. Ned, I assume. “Anyway, tell me what you came down here looking for, and I’ll tell you where you can find it. Though I will warn you—Miss Sally keeps the good stuff locked in the pantry.”

  “Oh.” Miss Sally’s warnings ring in my ear—her honor code, and the hidden cameras everywhere. But surely a tea bag doesn’t count as stealing, especially if I replace it first thing tomorrow. “I was hoping to borrow a tea bag, actually.”

  “Well, that’s easy enough.” She hops off the table and pads on bare feet across the room. Her shorts are the kind a cheerleader would wear, skintight and Daisy Duke short. “I’ve got a box of Lipton—hope that’s okay.”

  You once hurled a full cup of piping hot tea at my head because it was Lipton. You said if you’d wanted a cup of hot piss, you would have asked for some.

  I smile. “Lipton is perfect, thank you.”

  She pulls a yellow box from a drawer by the microwave, flips on the electric kettle, drops the bags in two mugs she finds in a cabinet.

  “So, what were you doing down here?” I say, gesturing to the table. “Why were you sitting here in the dark?”

  “I was meditating.”

  “Seriously?” It’s not at all what I was expecting. She doesn’t seem like the type—too fidgety, too va-va-voom to be that grounded. “In the middle of the night?”

  “Why not? Meditation relieves stress, increases concentration, clears your mind and calms your nerves.” She closes her eyes, holds her hands in the air, palms to the sky, in a classic meditation pose. I notice a tattoo that pokes out from the collar of her white tank top, winding down the skin of one arm. The other is covered in bracelets, leather and bright, colorful beads. “Ommmmmm.” Her eyes pop open, her gaze finding mine. “I’ll teach you sometime. Honestly, I’m glad to have another one of us here. Another female, I mean. We’re the only ones, if you don’t count Miss Sally. I don’t know if you’ve noticed yet, but this place is boiling over with testosterone.”