Dear Wife

by Kimberly Belle

  Outside on the catwalk, two men are negotiating a drug deal. They’re arguing about price, debating quality of product, but their voices are muffled by the roaring in my ears. All I catch are broken words, fragments of sentences, like the ones swimming on my computer screen.

  Body. Badly decomposed. Autopsy.

  I spring to my feet and pace in front of the bed. How stupid was I to think this was only about me? About me running from my past, from you. I was prepared to fight for my freedom, to pay for it with blood and broken bones, but I never stopped to consider that I might not be your only victim.

  I sink onto the bed, my eyes growing hot. Poor, sweet Sabine.

  I read the rest of the article in chunks, digesting the details with a rising horror.

  Sabine was strangled, her neck broken in two places, the bones and windpipe crushed. Her body was weighted and dumped into a pond off Highway 133, where it rotted for at least a week, maybe more. Something—a boat, the wildlife—worked her free from her underwater grave, and she bobbed and floated until a hunter and his dog found her facedown in the reeds. She’d been picked apart by buzzards.

  Buzzards, oh my God.

  I picture Sabine’s body decaying away at the bottom of some unnamed pond, and the image knocks the breath out of me. For a second or two I can’t move, can’t even think, and then my brain kicks into overdrive, flashing the faces of people I’ve seen splashed across the news. That heartsick doctor. Sabine’s twin sister. Her husband. People who loved her, who prayed for her and wanted her back. My heart breaks at the idea they’re picturing the same thing.

  I drop my face in my hands and give in to my tears, crying for Sabine, for her friends and family, for me. For my own grief and fury and horror and rage and guilt.

  Most of all, for my guilt.

  Because I know Jeffrey is not the one who wrapped his fingers around her throat. He’s not the one who squeezed until two bones snapped, not the one who left her for the buzzards.

  I know it was you.

  BETH

  Ten days prior

  I crouched behind a juniper hedge, watching balloons bob above the open house sign, and waited until everybody left. A gaggle of blonde brokers in teetering heels, an older couple I recognized from church, a straggler with his pockets full of food. Sabine had once told me there were always moochers. She’d laughed as she said it, as if she couldn’t care less that strangers stopped by with the sole motivation of snagging some snacks, and I remember thinking she was so nice, so understanding and generous, and that was even before she offered to help me. But the point is, I waited until everybody was gone.

  When it was all quiet, I craned my head around the branches, searched up and down the street. No cars, no pedestrians out walking their dog in this heat. Only the sounds of traffic on Hazel Street, humming in the distance. Still, I waited and I watched and I listened. Seven years with you had taught me I could never be too careful. When I was certain it was safe, I burst out of the shrubs to the side door.

  Sabine was stacking leftover cookies into a plastic container when I came into the kitchen. She saw me, and she sucked in a breath. “What are you doing here? Is everything okay? Omigod, don’t move. And get away from that window.”

  She shooed me out of sight and rushed past, her heels clicking on the marble. I heard the metallic clunk of the front door lock sliding into place, and two seconds later, she was back. She looked me over for cuts and bruises.

  “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “Only my ribs,” I say, cradling my right side with a palm, “but nothing’s broken.”

  Anyone else would have asked how I knew, but not Sabine. Sabine knew what you did to me. All those times you threw me down the stairs, the punches and the kicks and the bites, the concussions and broken ribs. She knew what you were capable of, and she helped me anyway.

  Do you even remember meeting her? I bet you don’t, do you? Sabine was the broker on that house on Hillcroft Street, the one we looked at last year. It was more house than we could afford, but you wanted it, and I knew better than to point out the obvious. The mortgage bank did it for me, two weeks later. When they turned us down, you got so mad you kicked me in the head.

  But you probably don’t remember Sabine because you were so busy strutting around the house, taking in the twelve-foot ceilings and granite countertops, the kitchen filled with shiny appliances we’d never use. But I noticed. I noticed the way her smile was too big but her eyes were sad, the way her makeup was thicker on one side, the way she kept touching her cheek like she had a toothache.

  She’s like me, I remember thinking. Her husband is like mine.

  And so, while you were up in the attic, banging on the rafters and inspecting the wiring, I asked if she was okay.

  “I’m fine,” she said, but her eyes didn’t quite meet mine and she smiled way too bright, the way I did when people asked me. “Honestly, I’m fine.”

  I could hear your footsteps overhead, stomping around up there in self-importance even though you didn’t have the slightest clue what you were looking at, and I knew I didn’t have much time.

  I wrapped my hand around her wrist and whispered, “My husband does it, too.” Sabine’s eyes went wide with understanding, with acknowledgment. “He hurts me, too.”

  Swear to God, I don’t even know why I said it. Up till then I hadn’t said those words to a single soul, not even to my sister, but that day the words just came right out. Finally, I’d dared to push open that heavy metal door that I thought was protecting me and told someone our dirty little secret. My knees went wobbly with relief.

  It was months before I ran into her again, in the shampoo aisle at the drugstore. She told me her husband had become a new man. Bringing her coffee in the mornings, tucking sweet notes in her work bag, calling her just because. He was trying so hard, she said around a stiff, synthetic smile, and my blood turned to ice and my fingers tingled. I looked at Sabine and I saw me, all those years ago. Before I understood that a backhand was the beginning, not the end, of a cycle.

  I took her hand, squeezed it until the bones slid under her skin. “This is what they do, Sabine. They create perfect, perfectly happy moments so that when the bad ones come again, and they will, we will remember those perfect moments and stay.”

  The understanding that crept up her face was identical to the one that was blooming in my chest. No woman wants to admit their marriage is over. We want to keep loving the person we once loved. We want the dream, the fairy tale of forever and ever after. To leave is to admit defeat.

  But it was that moment in the drugstore, warning a stranger off going down my path, when I knew I had to do the same. I needed to get off this path, too. I needed to break this cycle of tenderness and brutality. Even if parts of me got broken in the process.

  Sabine is the one who helped me come up with a plan—to skim off the grocery money, to make you think I’ve gone one way and then go another, to change my name and my hair, to hide in plain sight. She started volunteering at shelters, both for herself and for me. She interviewed the women there, researched what worked and what got women killed. She was like a graduate student with a thesis, single-minded and thorough.

  She fed her findings to me in bite-size chunks—in the locker room at the gym, at the water fountains at the park, in whispers while pumping our gas. We never chose the same place twice, and we never put anything in writing.

  We were so careful, and yet you found her anyway.

  But that day at the open house, I came to say goodbye.

  “You’re leaving? You’re really going through with it?” Her eyes widened like they did when she first saw me, only this time not with surprise but with pride. As much as she encouraged me to leave you, as many times as she told me I could, I think a bigger part of her never thought I’d do it. I’d been with you for so long, she didn’t think that I dared.

  I nodded. “I am.”

  “Do you know where you’re going?”

  I nodded
again. Tulsa, then a roundabout route to Atlanta, but I kept that part to myself. Sabine wouldn’t want to know, and I wouldn’t want to tell her. She already knew too much.

  “And what about his friends? Those cops you thought might be watching you. How do you know they won’t follow?”

  “I don’t. But the whole department is at a training in Little Rock today. Anger management, if you can believe the irony. Anyway, they’re all there until four. If you’ve ever thought of robbing a bank, today would be a good day to do it.”

  She laughed. “Speaking of banks, how much money do you have?”

  “Not quite four thousand, including what’s on Nick’s card.” Sabine knew Nick because he was her idea. She was the one who told me how to set up the account, the one who dug him up from God knows where. She didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, though by then she was volunteering at that battered women’s shelter so I had my suspicions. But it was an unspoken agreement between us, to share only the most essential information, nothing more, a need-to-know basis. She’d lived here all her life, too, and she was all too aware of how much power you had in this town, how many people were watching. The less we knew about each other, the better.

  She fumbled through her bag on the island, pulling out a wad of cash crumpled from her wallet. “Here. This is all I have on me, but I want you to have it.” When I didn’t immediately reach for the money, she wagged the bills in the air. “Please. It’ll make me worry a whole lot less if you take it.”

  I pocketed the cash, because the truth was, I needed it. Four thousand dollars wouldn’t last me long.

  And yet when it came to my interactions with Sabine, the money was the very last thing to be thankful for. Not only did she hand me the road map to a life away from you, she told me I was strong enough to go down it. She said not only that I should, but that I could. It wasn’t one thing she said but a million encouraging words piled on top of each other. Sabine believed in me, and she taught me to believe in myself. It’s because of her that I took back my power.

  “I’m going to pay you back,” I said, standing. “Not just for the money, but for everything. I don’t know how yet, but I swear to you, one day I’ll repay all your kindness.”

  “Oh, hush.” She smiled, her eyes going bright. “You know, when we first started talking about this, I didn’t think you’d go through with it. I thought it would take a tidal wave to get you away from him, but look at you now. I’m so stinking proud of you.”

  There were so many things I should have said. That she was the strong one for stepping out of her marriage before the violence could become a cycle. That when she supported me, she gave me some of her strength. That her pride and friendship made me so much braver than I ever thought I could be. That I owed her everything.

  But I thought I had plenty of time.

  “Thank you,” I said instead. “I’ll never forget everything you’ve done for me.”

  “Just be safe, okay? And be happy again. That’s the best thanks you could ever give me.”

  We hugged and then she pushed me out the door, and I made my escape through the side yard. Right before I slipped into the bushes, I turned one last time, and I spotted her, proud and hopeful, in the kitchen window.

  It was the last time I ever saw Sabine.

  BETH

  I don’t mean to fall asleep, but the news of Sabine so exhausts me, so drains me of energy and emotion and tears, that it’s all I can do to peel off my jeans and brush my teeth. I collapse on the bed in yesterday’s T-shirt, and I’m out the second my head hits the grubby pillow.

  Shouting on the catwalk pops my eyes wide. A jumble of angry voices, right outside my room. I bolt upright in bed, springing onto the floor before I’m even aware of being awake. A woman’s voice hollers, something about money. A lower rumble answers, muffled and slurred, but the woman isn’t having it. Her words escalate in volume and urgency, her shrieks rattling the glass in the window.

  I check the time on my phone. Just before 4:00 a.m.

  “Shut the fuck up!” a third voice yells through the wall. My neighbor, the skinny black man in the next room, but it doesn’t do him any good. The people outside are still slinging curse words, still threatening each other with bodily harm. There’s forty dollars on the line, and both of them are convinced that it’s theirs.

  The argument swells into a sharp pop, followed by a quick burst of three more—popopop—and I hit the floor. The commotion soon fades into footsteps, a heavy body making a noisy run for it, and the catwalk falls into silence. I peel myself off the grimy carpet, lift up a corner of the curtains and peek outside.

  A light flickers outside my door, a short in the system that should come with a warning for epileptics. But there are no bodies as far as I can see, no blood on the concrete.

  I drop the curtains and skirt past the window to the door, pressing myself to the cinder block wall. The silence stretches for three minutes, then five. I push off the wall and step into my jeans with the efficiency of a firefighter.

  The silence lingers, but the adrenaline in my veins says I’ll never get back to sleep, so I fire up the laptop and navigate to the internet. Might as well get to work.

  Work. Funny how I’ve come to think of my internet check-ins as work. Scouring the Pine Bluff police department’s website and Facebook page, monitoring the news and police scanner. Ever since finding out about Sabine, I’ve been pinging back and forth between the two sites, watching for news and waiting.

  Sabine’s funeral is later today, a service at First Baptist that’s expected to be standing room only, followed by a private burial at Memorial Park featuring her husband, her lover and her sister, none of whom are getting along. Ingrid is suing Jeffrey for the money in Sabine’s bank accounts, and Jeffrey is countersuing to keep it. Trevor doesn’t want the money but a couple of personal effects—the photographs off her computer, a ring she was wearing when she died, an antique vase they bought on a clandestine weekend getaway. In response, Jeffrey sued him for $1.5 million in damages, blaming him for ruining their marriage. My heart pinches for Sabine, who would be horrified at their ridiculous bickering.

  I pause at an uptick in chatter on the scanner, a break in the drone of the mundane shoplifting and suspicious person sightings, suddenly shifting to something much more frenetic. Another body found, a man shot in the head in a downtown alleyway, according to one of the voices a drug deal gone bad. I relax somewhat, carrying the laptop into the bathroom, balancing it on the edge of the sink and turn on the shower.

  I’m smearing conditioner through my overprocessed hair when I hear it, your name and badge number, the dispatcher calling you to the scene, and my hands pause on my hair. I swipe the curtain aside and stick my head out, listening for your voice, but it’s another one that crackles on the scanner. That cop buddy of yours, jumping in on your call.

  I rinse and towel off in a hurry.

  I knew when I left Pine Bluff you would find me eventually. Finding people is what you do, and I’ve left enough clues to make it—well, if not easy, then definitely enjoyable. I picture you speeding in your car east to Atlanta, congratulating yourself on hunting me down like I knew you would. As long as I’m alive, you’ll never let me go.

  I sling my bag over a shoulder and take a peek outside. All clear.

  You told me I was stupid, that I was helpless without you, and for a long time, I believed you. But I’m a lot smarter than you think I am. Sabine taught me that. I know that every check-in to a website leaves a ping for Jade to find. I know as kind and forgiving as the Reverend is, he has reported the stolen money by now. Police reports mean clues, charges involving a woman with a fake name, a fake ID with a picture of me, yet another ping. And I suspect you’re no longer in Pine Bluff, at least according to the scanner. You might even be here already. If I close my eyes, I can feel your breath on my neck and your teeth snapping at my back.

  And when you get here, I’ll be ready.

  With my new phone, I navigate eigh
teen miles to the north, to a park overlooking a bend in the Chattahoochee River. I walk to the edge and stare out over the water, and the sight is both familiar and disappointing. The river you and I grew up on is a wild thing, with dangerous, unpredictable currents and banks that encroach on yards and farms at the slightest hint of rain. Unlike that one, this river is lazy, a gentle stretch of brown water trickling across rocks and lapping at the red clay shores. A fallen tree angles across the stones, stretching almost to the other side.

  I slide my old cell, the last of the burners I bought in Pine Bluff, from my bag, look down at the dark screen. I didn’t have to come all this way. I could have tossed it in a dumpster on the opposite side of town, or handed it over to a bum like I did with the other three. I kind of liked the thought of sending whoever’s tracking it on a wild-goose chase, but just like insisting on a McDonald’s for my meeting with Nick, it seemed fitting to give it a watery grave. This chase started along the banks of a river, and it will end at one. Symmetry.

  I rear back with an arm, but an unexpected wave of nostalgia sticks my cell to my fingers. This device is the last thing tying me to the people I’ve met here, Miss Sally and the Reverend and Martina. If they’ve tried to reach me, it will have been on this device.

  I power it up one last time, my heart kicking when it catches a cell tower, even though by the time anyone tracks it here, I’ll be long gone. The phone beeps, and the messages roll in. Missed calls, unanswered texts from the church, from the Reverend, from a bunch of numbers I don’t recognize. I spot the one I’m looking for, tap it with a thumb.

  Two unread messages from Martina, plus a photo.

  The picture comes first, and the sight of it catches in my throat. It’s you, back to the camera, walking down the steps of the church. She took it from an awkward angle, through a window in the executive offices, but I recognize your hair, the shape of your ear, the shirt I got you last Christmas. The sight of you rattles my heart.