The Marriage Pact

by Michelle Richmond

  “I shouldn’t be embarrassed by my nudity,” she continues, as if she hadn’t heard me. “That’s what they want, but there’s no reason for it.” She unfolds her arms and lays her legs flat. Her feet are pointed directly at me. Her breasts are small, her body pale. Suddenly, she spreads her legs slightly. Involuntarily, my eyes flicker there. I blush and raise my gaze back to her face. She gives me a quick, strange smile.

  Just then, I hear a rumbling, and the wall I’m leaning against begins to move. At first I think I must be imagining it. But then I see that the wall behind JoAnne is definitely moving. I scoot forward. So does JoAnne.

  “Every hour,” she says, “the room gets an inch smaller.”

  “What?”

  “The room is shrinking. That’s how unhappy they are with me. I will be a flat, naked pancake before they realize I’ve been telling the truth all along.”

  The coldness in her voice sends shivers through me. How can she be so nonchalant? Would they really do such a monstrous thing? Surely not. I think of the psychological experiments I read about in college, the experiments JoAnne and I talked about during late-night study sessions—experiments so cruel the subjects still experienced nightmares and fractured personalities years later. One of our professors even had us design hypothetical experiments in obedience. Back then, it all seemed so abstract.

  “JoAnne, what do they think you’re lying about?”

  “They think I’m having an affair with you. Not just you—others too. Neil found a schedule on my phone. He misinterpreted it. He thought I was having a secret rendezvous at the Hillsdale mall.”

  “That’s bullshit!” I say, too loudly.

  “Isn’t it?” she agrees. “How romantic. The Hillsdale mall. The irony is, he’s worried that I’m fucking you, and his punishment is to send me away and have me put in a box, naked, with you. He’s both paranoid and stupid.”

  Before I can reply, the door opens. Gordon stands just outside the glass, on the top step, looking angry.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I ask JoAnne. A ridiculous question. Of course she is not going to be okay.

  She hugs her knees to her chest again. “Don’t worry about me,” she says drily. “Haven’t they told you? Everyone comes here of their own free will. We’re all just salivating for reeducation. Really, they’re doing me a favor.”

  She glares up at Gordon, defiant.

  “Time’s up,” Gordon says.

  I step out of the box and down the steps, and follow Gordon to the door. I glance back. JoAnne is now standing, facing me, palms pressed against the glass wall.

  I grab Gordon’s arm. “We can’t leave her here.”

  But before I have a chance to say anything else, I feel something slam against the back of my knees. My legs buckle and I go down. My head slams against the concrete floor, and everything goes dark.

  58

  I come to on a Cessna, bumping through the air. My head is throbbing, and there is blood on my shirt. I have no idea how much time has passed. I look at my hands, expecting to see restraints, but there are none. Just an ordinary seatbelt looped around my waist. Who strapped me in? I don’t even remember boarding the plane.

  Through the open door of the cockpit, I see the back of the pilot’s head. It’s just the two of us. There is snow in the mountains, wind buffeting the plane. The pilot seems completely focused on his controls, shoulders tense.

  I reach up and touch my head. The blood has dried, leaving a sticky mess. My stomach rumbles. The last thing I ate was the French toast. How long ago was that? On the seat beside me, I find water and a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. I open the bottle and drink.

  I unwrap my sandwich—ham and Swiss—and take a bite. Shit. My jaw hurts too much to chew. Someone must have punched me in the face after I hit the ground.

  “Are we going home?” I ask the pilot.

  “Depends on what you call home. We’re headed to Half Moon Bay.”

  “They didn’t tell you anything about me?”

  “First name, destination, that’s about it. I’m just the taxi driver, Jake.”

  “But you’re a member, right?”

  “Sure,” he says, his tone unreadable. “Fidelity to the spouse, loyalty to The Pact. Till death do us part.” He turns back just long enough to give me a look that tells me not to ask any more questions.

  We hit an air pocket so hard my sandwich goes flying. An urgent beeping erupts. The pilot curses and frantically pushes buttons. He shouts something to air traffic control. We’re descending fast, and I’m clutching the armrests, thinking of Alice, going over our final conversation, wishing I’d said so many things.

  Then, suddenly, the plane levels out, we gain altitude, and all appears to be well. I gather the pieces of my sandwich from the floor, wrap the whole mess back up in the wax paper, and set it on the seat beside me.

  “Sorry for the turbulence,” the pilot says.

  “Not your fault. Good save.”

  Over sunny Sacramento, he finally relaxes, and we talk about the Golden State Warriors and their surprising run this season.

  “What day is it?” I ask.

  “Tuesday.”

  I’m relieved to see the familiar coastline out my window, grateful for the sight of the little Half Moon Bay Airport. The landing is smooth. Once we touch down, the pilot turns and says, “Don’t make it a habit, right?”

  “I don’t plan to.”

  I grab my bag and step outside. Without killing the engines, the pilot closes the door, swings the plane around, and takes off again.

  I walk into the airport café, order a hot chocolate, and text Alice. It’s two P.M. on a weekday, so she’s probably embroiled in a thousand meetings. I really need to see her.

  A text reply arrives. Where are you?

  Back in HMB.

  Will leave in 5.

  It’s more than twenty miles from Alice’s office to Half Moon Bay. She texts about traffic downtown, so I order French toast and bacon. The café is empty. The perky waitress in the perfectly pressed uniform hovers. When I pay the check, she says, “Have a good day, Friend.”

  I go outside and sit on a bench to wait. It’s cold, the fog coming down in waves. By the time Alice’s old Jaguar pulls up, I’m frozen. I stand up, and as I’m checking to make sure I have everything, Alice walks over to the bench. She’s wearing a serious suit, but she has changed out of heels into sneakers for the drive. Her black hair is damp in the fog. Her lips are dark red, and I wonder if she did this for me. I hope so.

  She stands on her tiptoes to kiss me. Only then do I realize how desperately I’ve missed her. Then she steps back and looks me up and down.

  “At least you’re in one piece.” She reaches up and touches my jaw gently. “What happened?”

  “Not sure.”

  I wrap my arms around her.

  “So why were you summoned?”

  There’s so much I want to tell her, but I’m scared. The more she knows, the more dangerous it will be for her. Also, let’s face it, the truth is going to piss her off.

  What I’d give to go back to the beginning—before the wedding, before Finnegan, before The Pact turned our lives upside down.

  “Do you have time?”

  “Sure. Can you drive? I can’t see in this fog.” She tosses me the keys.

  I put my duffel in the trunk, get into the driver’s seat, and lean over to unlock the passenger-side door. I pull back onto the highway. At Pillar Point Harbor, I turn toward the ocean. I park across the street from Barbara’s Fishtrap, looking around to make sure we haven’t been followed.

  “You okay?” Alice asks.

  “Not really.”

  The place is almost empty, so we take a table in the corner with a hazy view out over the water. She orders the fish and chips, and a Diet Coke. I get a BLT and a beer. When the drinks arrive, I gulp half of mine down in one sip.

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” she says. “Don’t leave anything out.”

  But
that’s just the problem, isn’t it? All the things I’ve left out.

  I’m still trying to figure out how to tell her, mentally editing and revising my story. I’m not sure how I got to this point; I wish I had just told her everything from the beginning. Of course, all of my small decisions made perfect sense in a vacuum, but now, in hindsight, the parts don’t entirely add up.

  I tell her about how Chuck and I got separated after we arrived at Fernley. “They cuffed him and took him to a different building.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.” I tell her about my luxurious accommodations.

  “So you really weren’t in trouble, then?” She sounds surprised.

  The waitress brings our plates, and Alice digs into her fish and chips. Even though I’m still hungry, I pick at my food. “It’s complicated.”

  “Were you or weren’t you?”

  “They wanted to ask me about JoAnne.”

  Alice’s relaxed demeanor changes instantly. I can see anxiety forming; her eyes change; that telltale worry line between her brows deepens. As I mentioned, Alice’s issues all fall into that complicated, dark area where insecurity, jealousy, and suspicion collide. When we first met, it would often come on swiftly and catch me off guard. It was a bad mixture. I would get angry or defensive, and my defensiveness would only heighten her suspicion. I told myself it was something we could get past once we were engaged, once she was certain of my love for her, my commitment. And since the engagement, and certainly the marriage, her episodes of jealousy have been less frequent. And when they do happen, I’ve been more intuitive. Usually, I see them coming, and I react in a way that deescalates the situation. Here, though, I’m not sure how to proceed.

  “JoAnne from the dorm?” she says, setting her fork down beside her plate.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” I can sense her doing a million calculations in her head. The jealous Alice is so opposite from the regular, quirky, independent Alice. Even though I know both sides of her now, the transformation is always jarring. “The mousy one who cornered you at Draeger’s?”

  I nod.

  “Why would they ask you about her?” She seems baffled. As I mentioned, JoAnne isn’t the kind of person who stands out. Not the kind of person a wife would necessarily notice, or worry about.

  “Later, at the second party, I talked to her again. She was obviously stressed about something. She was worried Neil or someone would see us talking, so I asked if we could talk later, somewhere else. I wanted to find a way out of The Pact for both of us. She finally agreed to meet me at the Hillsdale mall.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “She was paranoid. She asked me not to bring you. She worried that if Neil found out that we were talking about The Pact, we’d all be in deep shit. She’d already spent time at Fernley; she didn’t want to go back. And I remembered that she had bruises on her legs at the party…She seemed so disturbed. Terrified. Why would I drag you into that?”

  Alice pushes away from the table and folds her arms. “After you first introduced us, I asked if you’d slept with her. You said no. Was that the truth?”

  I should have prepared an answer to this question. But really, there’s no way to make it look like I wasn’t hiding something from her. “We might have dated a little. Back in college. It didn’t work out, so after a few months we went back to just being friends.”

  “A few months? So you lied to me. Deliberately.”

  “I was so surprised to see her that night at the first party. It was all so out of context—”

  “Sex is rarely out of context.” Alice is angry now, tears rolling down her face. And yes, I’ll admit it: Her tears make me angry.

  “It was seventeen years ago, Alice! It was irrelevant.” I look up and realize that our server is watching. We shouldn’t even be talking here. We shouldn’t say anything in public. I lower my voice. “What were you doing seventeen years ago? Who were you sleeping with?”

  As soon as I’ve said it, I regret it.

  “First of all, you know exactly where I was and what I was doing, because I’ve told you. This is not about what happened seventeen years ago; I don’t give a shit about that. It’s about what happened in the past few weeks. It’s about you lying to me now, in the present.” Alice falls silent, and I can see that something has occurred to her. “That’s why Dave kept mentioning you and the Hillsdale mall.” She shakes her head. “When I told you about it, you didn’t say a word. You intentionally kept me in the dark.”

  Something flickers in Alice’s eyes I’ve never seen before: disappointment.

  “Look, I’m sorry. But I was desperate to see if there was a way out. And I knew that if I told you, you’d want to go, and it would be even more risky. You’d just gotten back from Fernley. I was trying to protect you.” When I hear the words, I realize how feeble they sound.

  “Don’t you think that should have been my decision? Aren’t we supposed to be in this together?”

  “Listen, when I saw JoAnne at the mall, she told me some things that scared me. She said that there was a couple in The Pact before us—Eli and Elaine. Just weeks before we joined, they disappeared. Their car was found at Stinson Beach, and they haven’t been seen since. JoAnne is certain they were murdered. By The Pact.”

  Doubt passes over Alice’s face. “I’ll admit their tactics are extreme, but murder is a little far-fetched, don’t you think? Seriously.”

  “Hear me out. She said the one thing no one ever mentions is that The Pact has an alarmingly high rate of marriages ending in early death.”

  Alice is shaking her head.

  “What about Dave?” I say. “He and Kerri were both married to other people when they joined the Pact.”

  “Coincidence. You can’t base a huge conspiracy theory on one coincidence.”

  “Here’s the important thing. JoAnne says we have to find a way to get off their radar. She thinks you’re in danger. She thinks they like you, but they feel you need to be corralled, controlled. She said they don’t know what to make of me.”

  “Did you meet her again after that?” Alice has unfolded her arms and is facing me directly. I imagine that this is something she does during her more difficult depositions. It makes me uncomfortable.

  “She agreed to meet me in the same spot three weeks later, but she didn’t show. When I left, I realized I was being followed.”

  “And you haven’t seen her since?” Alice asks.

  “No. Well, yes. She was at Fernley. But she wasn’t there like me, or even like you. She was in a cage, Alice. A glass cage that was literally shrinking, with her in it.”

  Alice’s face changes, and she laughs out loud. “You’re not serious!” Alice is strange that way—she can switch in an instant from jealousy and anger to perfectly normal conversation. Her laugh is hard to read.

  “It’s not a joke, Alice. She was in serious trouble.”

  I tell her about the endless corridors, the locked doors. I tell her about the interview with Gordon. “They just kept asking me all of these questions about JoAnne.”

  “Why would they ask you about her, Jake? So help me God, if you fucked her again, we’re finished. There’s nothing you or The Pact or anyone else can do to make me stay—”

  “I did not fuck her!”

  But I can see it in her eyes: She doesn’t entirely believe me.

  I look over to the table next to us. A couple around our age are sitting with a bucket of fried shrimp between them. They’re picking at the food, clearly tuned in to our conversation. Alice notices them too and scoots her chair closer to the table.

  I tell her about the sole occupant of solitary confinement. I tell her about JoAnne’s matted hair, her nakedness, her obvious fear. I don’t leave anything out. Okay, maybe I don’t mention JoAnne spreading her legs, but I tell her everything else. Alice’s face registers confusion, then horror. And I can see we’ve moved past the jealousy, and now we’re in this together again, Alice
and me against something bigger.

  She’s sitting in stunned silence when her phone goes off. The vibration on the table makes us both gasp. Immediately, I fear that it’s The Pact calling. Dave, maybe, or even Vivian.

  “Just the office,” Alice says, answering. She listens for a minute or more, then just says “Okay.” She hangs up. “I have to go into work.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.” Nothing more. Before, she would have told me why. She would have confided in me about the case, complained about office politics. But instead, she tells me nothing. I can tell she doesn’t like me very much right now.

  When we get to the car, she asks me for the keys. She drives fast, making abrupt stops and rough turns. All the way home, through the tunnel, up past Pacifica and Daly City, I can tell that Alice is still trying to process what I’ve told her. She dumps me out front of our house, clicks the garage door open for me to enter, then heads to work.

  I take a shower and change. When I open my overnight bag, I realize that my clothes smell like Fernley. It’s a mix of desert air, cleaning fluid, and five-star cuisine. I turn on the TV, but I’m too wired to watch anything, too stressed about the tension with Alice. Things have never been this way with us before. I mean, we’ve had episodes, but not like this.

  I throw on my coat and head over to the office. Huang frowns when he sees me. “Bad news, Jake. We lost two couples today. The Stantons and the Wallings called to cancel their appointments.”

  “For this week?”

  “No. Forever. They both filed for divorce.”

  The Wallings don’t surprise me, but I had real hopes for the Stantons. Jim and Elizabeth, married fourteen years, both super-nice, well matched. I sulk down the hallway, feeling the weight of failure. How can I save anyone else’s marriage if I can’t save my own?

  59

  The study that interests me the most is about the effectiveness of marriage counseling. Does counseling correlate with a higher or lower likelihood of divorce? In my own practice, I’ve seen mixed results, though it seems that the couples who persevere through at least eight to ten weeks of sessions tend to emerge with a stronger bond than the one they shared on the first day.