Haunted Hearts

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  Their steaks arrived, and Susan agreed with McGuire that they were very good, perfectly cooked and tender. They avoided discussing Susan’s past while they ate, commenting instead of the dying light on the water, the seabirds circling above the pier, and the masts of the pleasure boats that rocked with the waves. When they finished, McGuire ordered coffee, and Susan slipped back into her story again.

  “We bought a house in Newton and we had . . .” She looked down at her lap, and when McGuire reached to take her hand, she pulled it away and shook her head, saying she was all right, she really did want to talk about this. “I had a son we named James, but we always called him Jamie, and two years later we had a girl, Belinda. They were beautiful babies, beautiful children.”

  “Do you have pictures of them?”

  She shook her head again.

  “And you haven’t seen them for two years?”

  She nodded.

  “Because you were in prison.”

  Another nod.

  “Tell me what you did that sent you to prison.”

  “I’m trying to.”

  “No, you’re not.” McGuire set his coffee cup aside. “You’ve told me about your father, your mother, and your grandparents. That’s not what sent you to jail.”

  “No, it didn’t.”

  “What did you do?”

  She looked up at him and a smile began to play at the corners of her mouth, an embarrassed reaction. “I stole over half a million dollars. From a bank.”

  “You robbed a bank?” McGuire’s voice said he didn’t believe it.

  “Not exactly.”

  “What happened to the money?”

  “I never touched it.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Susan looked around them. The restaurant had grown crowded since they arrived. The adjacent tables were filled with diners, all of them chatting, eating, enjoying the view of the harbour, or studying the menu. McGuire called the waiter over, asked for the check, and ten minutes later they were back in his car, driving through the gathering darkness along the shore road, south towards Boston, while Susan resumed her story.

  “I loved the suburban life, all the corniness of it,” she said. Their neighbours were families of similar age, with similar cars, similar interests, similar ambitions. They held neighbourhood yard sales and neighbourhood barbecues. The men played softball on Sunday afternoons in the park at the end of the street, and the women—those who didn’t hold jobs to help pay for family expenses—played bridge and traded recipes and complaints about their husbands, how the men never seemed to understand their problems.

  On their tenth anniversary, her husband bought her a new vacuum cleaner.

  A few weeks later, she sat alone over a cup of coffee and realized she couldn’t remember the last time her husband had called her by her name. She called him Thomas, but he never used her name. When she mentioned it to him that evening, he laughed, and over the next few days he would never speak in her presence without saying Susan, teasing her until she angrily told him to stop it.

  The next time he called her by her name was the evening he returned from a ten-day management-training session in Chicago, and confessed that while there, he had had an affair with a woman from San Diego.

  “It was impossible,” she said. “Impossible in my mind. Thomas wasn’t one of those people. I never believed he could be one of those people.”

  “What people?”

  “People who would lie to me. People who would cheat and be unfair. When I was growing up, I thought everybody was like my grandmother and grandfather, honest and caring. Then I realized not everybody was like them, but that everybody should be. Eventually, I just divided people into two groups. People who were basically good and people who were basically bad. I thought my friends, my children, and especially my husband were basically good. It never occurred to me that he could be as deceitful as anybody else.”

  It never does, McGuire thought.

  She cried over her husband’s infidelity less than she expected to, but a numbness crept into her soul. He apologized, assuring her it had been just a fling and it was over, which may have been true, except that, not long after, she found a photograph of a slim woman with long flowing black hair in his briefcase one day while he was playing squash. The woman’s head was tilted slightly, so she was looking up at the camera, one hand toying with her hair.

  Susan fastened it to the refrigerator door with a Winnie the Pooh magnet, just above a crayon drawing of a cat, made by their daughter. Thomas was furious when he found it, accusing her of snooping and distrusting him, telling her the woman had given him the picture in Chicago. Susan did not believe it was a photo of that woman. She believed it was another woman, a new affair. Their argument continued in the bedroom, until the sound of their children crying outside their door ended the shouts and accusations.

  “We did what every couple does in a situation like that,” she said. They were enveloped in darkness now, passing Swampscott, where McGuire had sat alone, watching dawn arrive, a few days earlier. “We went to see a marriage counselor.”

  After six sessions, the counselor smiled and suggested, Yes, Thomas had stumbled, and yes, perhaps he was not as romantic as Susan hoped, but a romantic ideal is like a perfect cloud in a summer sky, it is forever changing and evolving and all we can do is recall it as it used to be in all its perfection. On the way home in the car Susan told her husband she thought the sessions had been a crock.

  “He kept saying he still loved me,” she said, “and that he was sorry. Over and over, he kept saying it. I didn’t believe him. I think I was too hurt and angry to believe him.”

  With her children in school, Susan decided to begin a new career. To brush up on her skills, she enrolled in afternoon classes at a business school, riding the MBTA downtown after lunch to sit in a classroom with other housewives and high-school dropouts, studying word processing and bookkeeping. She enjoyed the freedom, the opportunity to practice new skills, and, within a week of beginning classes, she enjoyed the special attentions of the owner of the business school, who would frequently visit the classes to assist an instructor or simply to admire the female students.

  After class late one afternoon he asked to speak to her, suggesting she catch a later train home that evening. He told her she was far too advanced for her classes. In fact, she was ready for a job right now, and he just happened to have a position open in the business-school office for a woman of her skills and her personality.

  “He was very charming, very persuasive.” Susan looked at McGuire as though begging him to believe her. “He said there would be some evening work, but I would be paid overtime for that, and there were a number of fringe benefits. He talked about me attending business-school training sessions in Miami and Dallas. He said he would send me there at his expense, that he needed someone to take over administration of the school. That first evening, he drove me home in his car, all the way back to Newton.”

  The man’s name was Ross Myers, and he was so many things that her husband Thomas wasn’t. He was exciting to be around, and attentive to her. He did romantic things that her husband had forgotten to do, or never learned—opening doors, paying her compliments, surprising her with flowers. He had an element of spontaneity about him, even a hint of danger in the things he said, the things he boasted about having done. Within a few weeks, she was staying downtown with him for dinner, making up stories to explain her absence. “I was amazed at how easily I could lie to Thomas and even to my children,” she said. “I lied about where I was at night, and where I’d gotten the jewelry Ross bought for me. He kept surprising me with gifts, he kept telling me how beautiful I was . . .”

  “And he was married.”

  “Of course he was married.”

  “And that didn’t bother you?”

  Instead of answering, she said: “I was married too, don�
��t forget.”

  “Just a couple of people having a fling?”

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice carried a defiance that McGuire hadn’t heard before. “No,” she said, when he didn’t reply. “I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I don’t think it was just a fling. I’m not sure I loved Thomas, to tell you the truth. He was the father of my children, he was my source of security, and all of that, but . . . If Thomas hadn’t hurt me the way he did, if we had just kept things the way they were, I suppose I would have been content. But he didn’t, and when Ross started doing all the things he did for me, I found him exciting.” She stared through the windshield as she spoke, her voice lower, as though she were speaking to herself. “Even when I found out what kind of person he was, the kind of person he really was, that was exciting too, I suppose.”

  “What’d this guy look like?” McGuire asked. “Myers. What did he look like?”

  “He’s a bit overweight, he was always worried about his weight. And his hair, he was afraid of losing his hair. He’d comb it just so, and never let me touch it. I touched it once when he was driving, just a gesture of affection, and he got angry with me, he told me never to touch his hair.”

  “Sounds like a total jerk.”

  She smiled, without humour. “You never heard of anyone falling for somebody who turns out to be a jerk? Or maybe just a terrible bitch? You never heard of somebody trying to convince themselves that perhaps they haven’t made a terrible mistake after all?”

  Susan discovered that Myers’s business school wasn’t bringing in as much money as Myers seemed to be spending. Instructors were constantly complaining about receiving only partial pay for their services. Myers had two partners, one a lawyer, another a restaurant operator. He would often meet his partners over dinner with Susan, and she would listen to him describe the success of the business in terms she knew were not true. He would boast about the potential earnings of the school before asking for money, an infusion of capital to expand the business.

  One day, Myers handed her a first-class airline ticket to Miami, leaving the following week, and he said he would meet her there. When she told Thomas of the trip, she said she would be traveling alone to attend seminars. Thomas said he was proud of her success. He insisted on driving her to the airport and kissing her goodbye.

  In Miami, Myers met her with a bouquet of flowers, and they drove in a rented convertible directly to Hialeah racetrack. She found it all new and glamorous, especially when they sat in the VIP clubhouse area, where other men greeted Myers as though he were an old friend. Drinks were sent to their table, there was much laughter and teasing, and appreciative looks at Susan.

  Myers lost several thousand dollars that day, but he drove back to their room at the Fontainebleau as though he had won every race. He lost a similar amount the following day, but on the third day he won a few hundred dollars, and as they returned to the hotel from the racetrack he was elated. On the way he stopped at an upscale mall to buy her a new wardrobe, pulling skirts and sweaters from racks and telling her to try them on, nodding his approval or shaking his head in rejection as she emerged from the dressing rooms.

  Back in the hotel she checked the price tags and realized he had spent much more on gifts for her than he had won at the racetrack.

  The next day she told him she didn’t want to accompany him to the racetrack. She had come all this way to Miami and had yet to walk on the beach. He left her in a dark mood to visit the racetrack alone, but he called the room each hour, and had the hotel page her as she sunned herself by the swimming pool, saying he was coming right back, an edge of anger in his voice she had never heard before.

  In the room, he accused her of many things, all of them vile. Of inviting men to their room in his absence, of visiting other men in their rooms, of removing her bikini top on the beach. When she began to cry, he became remorseful, told her he was sorry, and offered her a drink. He left the room, returning with a bracelet from the jewelry shop in the hotel lobby. He made reservations at the best restaurant in Miami for just the two of them. They would have a romantic dinner followed by a drive along the oceanfront with the top down, he said, and maybe there would be a big, bright, full moon shining on the water for them.

  Two days later they arrived back in Boston, where everything had changed.

  Thomas ignored her when she arrived home in a cab, leaving her to struggle with her luggage alone. When she asked where the children were, he told her they were staying with his mother. She saw the fury in his eyes and the constant shaking of his hands, and she knew why.

  “Ross’s wife told him about us.” She was looking through the windshield, as she spoke. The lights of Boston were ahead, a shining city in the darkness. “She called Thomas the day before we returned and told him everything. She had suspected me for quite a while, I suppose. When she had proof and knew I lived in Newton, she called every Schaeffer in town until she reached Thomas and told him.”

  “How did you feel?” McGuire asked.

  “Guilty. And angry.” She lifted her hand to touch her cheek. “What I had done was terrible. But Thomas had done it too. It wasn’t revenge. I didn’t set out to sleep with a man for revenge. I wasn’t looking for revenge.”

  “But you found it.”

  “Yes.” She lowered her head. “He cried. He hit his head against the wall until I begged him to stop. For the first time in our marriage he struck me. He slapped me and knocked me to the floor. He asked me if I wanted a divorce, and I said no, I just wanted things right, they hadn’t been right for so long. He had been drinking all day, and he drank some more. He went out to the garage, and while he was there I called the children on the telephone to speak to them, I missed them so much. When I hung up, Thomas was standing in the hallway with a rifle in his hands, pointing it at me.”

  Her husband had purchased the gun that morning. He sighted along the barrel, mumbling to himself or to her, she never knew. She screamed and ducked below a table and he fired, shattering the window behind her. While he fumbled with the bolt action she ran to him, in part because he stood between her and the door. She hugged him and told him she was sorry, and he dropped the rifle and collapsed crying on the floor.

  The police arrived, alerted by neighbours, and they arrested Thomas. Susan claimed that the gun had fired by accident, that he hadn’t really meant to shoot her. He had been trying to frighten her, that was all. His lawyer claimed the trigger mechanism was faulty, and when he managed to have the charges reduced to attempted assault, Thomas was released on bail the following afternoon.

  “Get out of there,” Myers told her over the telephone. The children had been sent to Thomas’s parents for safekeeping. Susan was alone in the house. “Just get the hell out. I’ll find you an apartment downtown. We’ll get you settled there and later on you can have the kids with you. But don’t stay. He’s liable to shoot you again when he gets home.”

  It made sense to her. Myers appeared concerned about her welfare, saying he was in the process of separating from his wife, but there were complications due to his business affairs. When she was settled downtown, he would join her. They would marry and she would never regret it. Some day, some time in the future, she would see that all of this pain and guilt had been worth it. But it was almost a year before Myers and his wife separated, and in that time she lived alone, except for visits from Myers. Meanwhile, her husband kept the children at home and sought temporary custody, claiming she had abandoned them. When she grew distraught over the charge, Myers told her not to worry, a good lawyer would straighten things out.

  At the hearing, Thomas’s lawyer, Orin Flanigan, submitted evidence that Susan had left the house without the children, who moved back with their father within days of her departure. Flanigan was brilliant in his presentation, citing precedents and opinions over and over to prove his case. Susan’s lawyer offered only a weak defense against the accusation, and there was n
o surprise when the judge awarded Thomas custody of the children. Susan could have the children two weekends each month and for two weeks in the summer. The judge would review the arrangement in a year. The divorce was granted. Myers promised that he would appeal the decision, that he would hire the best lawyer money could buy. She would get her children back. He would do it for her.

  “I had nothing,’ she said. “No husband, no home, no children. I had only Ross and his promises.”

  Susan was given $20,000 from the sale of the house. “Ross asked me to invest it in the business,” she said. “He said it was a loan, and he would pay me back with interest.”

  “And you never saw a penny of it again.”

  “No.”

  McGuire thumped the steering wheel. “How could you be so stupid?” McGuire said. “How could you be so damn stupid?”

  “You think I haven’t asked myself that?”

  “You screw up your marriage, you hurt your kids . . . I just can’t understand how you could fall for this crap from a married man, a guy who sounds like he can’t tell anything but a lie. You could have left him and started over again. Why can’t women do that?”

  “Men always say that, don’t they?”

  “Maybe men have got it right.”

  “And maybe it’s none of your business.” She spoke without looking at him. “Did you ever think about that?”

  “Then why the hell are you telling me? Maybe it isn’t any of my damn business. But you’re the one doing the talking, aren’t you?”

  “I want you to know because I trust you, and that’s very hard for me to do. I trusted Thomas, I trusted Ross, I trusted Orin, and now he’s gone and I need to trust somebody, damn it.” The tears were flowing. “I need to trust somebody.”