A Circle of Wives

by Alice LaPlante

  He looks genuinely scared. “I didn’t kill John,” he says. “I have no reason to. You have to believe me.”

  Oddly enough, I do. He strikes me as cowardly, but not violent. I’m quiet for a minute. Then I get up and turn off the video recorder. “That’ll be all for now,” I say, and dismiss him.

  I sit in the chair he’s just vacated, still warm from his body, and sigh deeply. I don’t know what to think. But it’s the first crack in the seemingly impenetrable walls of this case.

  36

  MJ

  THOMAS WAS SUMMONED TO THE police department yesterday. They didn’t say why. That worried me.

  The thing is, Thomas doesn’t know how to stop talking. When he was brought into the principal’s office or police station as a boy on suspicion of something he hadn’t done, he often confessed to another crime he had committed. The police in Tennessee knew that, and exploited it shamelessly. He also ratted out his friends frequently. Not on purpose, but because he couldn’t stop blabbing.

  What makes me the most anxious is that I won’t know by questioning Thomas what he actually said. He always considered himself at the top of his game during talks with authorities, sort of a sly verbal Robin Hood who hoodwinks them at every turn. So when I called him this morning and asked him how things went yesterday, he said “fine,” and believed it, too. Now I wait fearfully for the next call from that young detective. She projects the innocence of a fawn, but is quite sharp. Not much gets past her.

  When I heard she’d called in Thomas I finally took her advice and hired a lawyer. I didn’t know how to go about it, so I just picked the firm with the biggest ad in the Yellow Pages. This is costing me four hundred dollars an hour. I’ve already spent more than a thousand because he needed time “getting up to speed,” and I told him my worries about Thomas going to the police alone. He asked if I wanted him to accompany Thomas, and I hesitated until I did the math. Given travel time, that would probably be another cool thousand dollars, so I said no. I need to conserve every penny I have for the mortgage.

  Then the lawyer told me Thomas didn’t have to go in, unless they issued a subpoena, but that it’s best to cooperate as much as possible. “Unless he’s hiding anything, of course,” he said, as if casually, but he was probing, I could tell. “Thomas has nothing to hide,” I said, and hung up. Another hundred dollars wasted, as he bills in quarter-hour increments.

  37

  Samantha

  “YOU CAN’T BOOK HIM, YOU can’t really touch him, without more evidence.”

  This is Grady speaking. I told him about the parking ticket, and he watched the video of Thomas’s interview. We’re sitting in Susan’s office, conferring.

  “I don’t think he did it. But he’s lying about something,” I say. “You can tell. Look at the way he shifts around. And every time he’s caught in a lie he makes up a new one. You can practically see him pulling these stories out of his ass.”

  “What do you imagine he knows?” Grady asks.

  “I dunno. Something.” I know that sounds weak.

  Susan finally pipes up. She’s been keeping me on what she calls a tight leash, asking for daily updates, and encouraging me to make use of Grady’s expertise. “Sam, that’s not how it works. We don’t charge someone until we feel we have a good case. Otherwise, the DA’s office is just going to throw it out. All you have are suspicious circumstances and weak circumstantial evidence. I’m afraid you’ll have to keep digging.”

  I’m frustrated. I turn to Grady. “What would be compelling enough evidence to bring this guy in?”

  “Fingerprints at the scene.”

  I shake my head.

  “An eyewitness that places him at the Westin instead of only near it.” Grady says.

  I shake my head again.

  “There was a major conference getting started,” I say. “Registration was in the lobby, and a cocktail hour spilled out of the meeting rooms to take over the entire first floor of the hotel. No one saw anything. We’ve been going down the list of attendees and showing them pictures of MJ, Deborah, Thomas, even Helen, although supposedly she was four hundred miles away. Nothing. Everyone was half bombed and looking to get laid, not exactly a noticing mindset.”

  “What about the potassium chloride?” asks Susan. “Did that lead you anywhere?”

  “It was just like Grady told me,” I nod toward him. “Google it, and it’s everywhere. Of course, you need a prescription, even for pets, but all the wives were in close proximity to prescription pads. I’ve checked all the local pharmacies. Nothing. . I’ve also put calls in to the top mail-order Canadian pharmacies online, but all are refusing to release customer records. And, since it’s a different country, I don’t have any leverage.”

  “Helen would have easy access to it at the hospital,” Grady says. “Don’t discount that. She would also have the knowledge.”

  “Yeah, but I Googled murder and heart attack and about a hundred sites came up that advised using potassium chloride.”

  “Either this country has a lot more murderers than I imagined, or everyone is writing a detective novel,” says Susan. “I suspect the latter is true.” She pauses for a moment, then asks, “How long does it take someone to die after they’ve been injected with potassium chloride? Did your research tell you that?’

  “In sufficient amounts, it can cause nearly instantaneous death,” I say. “Apparently, though, a person can survive for a little while if the injection isn’t enough to kill them immediately. They’d feel pretty awful, though.”

  Susan taps a pencil against her Diet Coke. “Okay,” she says, dismissing me. “Keep us in the loop, Sam. You’re doing good work. But if we don’t get a break on this case soon, I’m going to call in the Santa Clara County detectives. Those boys have been itching to get their hands on this since the beginning. This is too high profile to go unsolved.”

  38

  Helen

  THEY SAY THE PRESENT IS rooted in our past. Perhaps. Perhaps I was conditioned from birth to fall for a fraud such as John. Me being so well trained by my father to accept both abuse and affection from the same person. It is a mortifying thought. But then I have this child growing inside me. Yes, I keep reminding myself. This is real. It is a true source of joy. Unlike the past.

  When my mother was pregnant with my little sister, I was old enough—there were nine years between us—to sense her ambivalence about being pregnant at 42. My father would alternately rail at her to get an abortion, and lay his head against her belly, even when it was too early to feel the baby move. I wondered how she could take such badgering, but she maintained her calm throughout.

  My mother was a librarian at the Minneapolis public library, and would take me to work with her. I was always a good child. She could trust that I would do my homework, then safely amuse myself in the stacks. Occasionally she would stick her head down the row of shelves where I would be sitting cross-legged, reading, and smile. The legions of homeless people who would eventually overtake the place had not yet shown up. Those were magical hours. No worries about my father storming in, kicking the book out of my hands or, worse, appropriate it and force me to listen to him read it out loud. His voice was raspy, hard on the ears. John’s voice was so different, so soothing, so rational. And yet John turned out to live the crazier life.

  My father was highly educated, and charming, and loving. Most of the time. But then he would change. Something would trigger his temper and he’d rise and heave the kitchen table over while we were trying to eat. We’d have to wipe mashed potatoes and meatloaf from every crevice in the kitchen. Later he would weep and beg our forgiveness. Once I began my medical training, I realized that of course he could have been helped by medication. But back then I just accepted it—life had provided me with a gentle, caring mother and a violent, caring father. What I know now to be the toughest combination of all. What it has done to me is my own secret. I don’t turn over tables, but I do have a temper. On those rare occasions when I lose it I am fille
d with remorse and suffer for days. I only allow myself one apology, though—I will not be my father, begging for forgiveness. Dignity is essential. I leave the room to prevent myself from groveling before the person I’ve injured, the unfortunate nurse or orderly or, on a rare occasion, the parent of a dying child.

  But my father the weeping tyrant never exercised any restraint. He was president of a midsized pipe manufacturing company in north Minneapolis. I’m sure he was good at what he did; he exuded competence and authority outside the house, and seemed to have been able to control his moods while at work.

  I prefer to remember my father as a reader. That was why my mother the librarian had fallen in love with him. He would rhapsodize about Proust or James or Wharton. He was always quoting poetry, and indeed I learned early on that reading to him from the poems of Emily Dickinson could calm him down, could delay or even prevent the fits of rage and melancholy. Studies have shown that a good dose of poetry, spoken at the right time, can impact the same parts of the brain as the pills we use to medicate bipolar patients today.

  My father often slipped into quotations so easily and so naturally that you wouldn’t realize he was quoting at first. Not that he was trying to fool you. No. His thoughts just moved so quickly that he sometimes had trouble footnoting them. Most of what he would recite was melancholy. I frequently had to fight back the tears. But I did fight because I knew it was important not to give in to the sadness—or the frustration for that matter. I would not, I was resolved, end up as my father.

  So why did I choose pediatric oncology, what one professor in medical school said was the “saddest of all the professions”? Not out of any altruistic ideal to save children, although that is what I passionately try to achieve each and every day. No. It’s about stopping the cancer. Winning the battle. A place to focus my anger. For it’s always there, the rage, underscoring everything I do. You don’t choose pediatric oncology without that rage. You’d die of sadness, otherwise.

  About my poor mother, my father was fond of quoting Henry James:

  Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

  Yes, she was kind. Her kindness defined her, yet it didn’t always come easily. She had her demons, too. You could see her struggling sometimes, not during my father’s temper tantrums, as she called them, but at other times, when she fought against the tedium that was women’s lot in those days. The librarian’s role, although it kept her near her beloved books, was too limiting for her. She had a larger mind than that. Still, her familial challenges consumed most of her mental and emotional strength even though she dealt with those challenges with kindness and more kindness. The only sign that she was struggling was sometimes a slight hesitation before fulfilling the demands of my father, and, I’m now ashamed to say, me. I was a selfish child.

  Still, kindness, for my mother, was a discipline. That didn’t make it any less authentic. She was not faking it, she was not manufacturing it, she was calling it up from some place deep inside her that otherwise never saw the light of day. My mother was a complex woman.

  I say this because it all played into my decision to go into medicine. So my own deeply ambitious soul wouldn’t feel thwarted. I also knew I needed a way to channel my anger against a more formidable foe than a bipolar husband. And to practice my own brand of kindness in the midst of my own rage.

  My father once shared with me a quote about anger by Aristotle.

  Anybody can become angry—that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.

  That could stand for my life’s work: to channel anger to its rightful spot. In the battle between anger and joy, to give joy the better odds. But all I can think of right now, as I lie here trying to sleep, trying to empty my mind, is a quote from Medea:

  The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable,

  Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.

  39

  MJ

  JOHN ENCOURAGED ME TO GO visit my father—my mother was long dead by the time we married. But he always refused to come with me, said he couldn’t get away. Didn’t even let me send any photos of our wedding that included him. My father was puzzled by the beach ceremony. A marriage without a proper priest? Without a wedding dress? Without a dinner and dance afterward at the veterans’ hall? To him, it didn’t seem like John and I were married properly at all.

  But I’d already done the priest, white dress, and potluck dinner and dance at the VFW with my first husband, Brian. It was where everyone had their wedding receptions in Gatlinburg. If you didn’t know how to polka, you had the good manners to sit down until everyone had their fill of the Doghouse or the Bird Dance or was too drunk to stand any more. After the polka band put away their tubas and clarinets, the real party band (hired by the couple’s friends rather than parents) would start warming up, and the older folks would let the younger generation take over the floor. This was what everyone expected, and me and my few friends from high school hadn’t the courage to wish for anything more, or different.

  My wedding to John, in comparison, was idyllic. On the beach in Santa Cruz, by a hippy friend who had gotten his minister’s license from a crackpot website as a joke. My bridal bouquet was made of wild rosemary that grew out of the cracks of my apartment building’s parking lot in San Jose, where John and I lived until we found the house in Los Gatos.

  John always struck me as singularly upright. Except for the photo disagreement, he didn’t give any indication that he was on the lam from his real life. He would look anyone in the eye, and give the sort of handshake that indicated he was as upstanding as they come.

  These days, my embarrassment and guilt lay heavily upon me. A lifetime of sins accumulating. I can’t look anyone in the eye, not even strangers. I have trouble swallowing, and drink gallons of water for my dry throat. I glance in my rearview mirror more than is necessary. I shake out my shoes to find out what’s secreted itself inside them. Most of all, I hide from those who know me well.

  I felt this way after I ran off with Paul and Jackson still in diapers. Ashamed of my cowardice in stealing away without notice, I stayed away, not corresponding with anyone but Thomas. I never saw my mother again. I always wondered what she would have thought of who I became when I reached California—the real me, I’m convinced. Braless. Shoeless. Free of ponytail holders and bobby pins and belts. My mother was so different. Everything about her screamed restraint, from her shellacked hair to her girdle to her closed-toe shoes; even in the summer, she wore heavy shoes, even in the shower she wore a shower cap, even out of the shower she wore a robe rather than run through the house dripping in a towel. She whisked away your clothes to the laundry the minute you took off a blouse or a skirt, and it would be washed, dried, and folded neatly in your drawer while you were still searching the floor for the last place you’d dropped it.

  Then she died. Dying back home while the boys were twelve and thirteen, and we were scraping things together down in Santa Cruz in that house we shared with two guys who considered themselves surfers first and students second. Mother love. Gone like that. And it was years before John, before I felt loved again and redeemed by that love. All false, as it turned out, John as duplicitous as any run-of-the-mill adulterous husband. As for me, chalk up another failure to be ashamed of.

  The surfers always had the radio tuned to one obscure Santa Cruz station that played coded music for the surfers on where to find the waves. That was the year of secrets. The secret waves. My secret affair with a married father I’d met while gassing up my car between taking the boys to football practice, soccer practice, swim meets. Thomas’s secret boyfriend, who really wasn’t such a secret. And the secret my mother kept of her illness. She had been prone to bouts of sadness her whole life, and I think the breast cancer diagnosis must have felt like a relief. Two months
after burying her, my father moved in with a widow from Pigeon Forge.

  That was my last experience with death before John, a mother so sedated that she didn’t realize I’d been gone for eleven years when I called. She would say hello drowsily into the phone, her morphine dialed up as high as it would go, so I never really had a chance to say goodbye to her, either.

  40

  Samantha

  SUSAN SAYS I NEED TO start showing some progress. Says she’s seen this before, a growing obsession as success eludes, and that it’s unhealthy for the officer and unproductive for the department. “Sam,” Susan says, “another two weeks and I’m pulling you off this case.”

  I go back to my desk and click on one of the videos I found online of Dr. John Taylor. Educational videos on websites devoted to disfiguring birth defects or trauma: www.abeautifulchild.org and www.nomoredefects.org. I’m not interested in watching the surgeries themselves—surprisingly, a fair number of these have been videotaped. Rather, I watch and re-watch the classroom lectures accompanying them.

  I fast-forward through the clinical scenes until I get to the point where Dr. Taylor is standing in front of thirty students, explaining techniques for fixing cheiloschisis in infants. It is a beautiful thing. He ignores the camera. He makes eye contact with students, and uses his large hands as a ballet dancer would use her whole body, to express what is inexpressible in words. I watch his face in particular. He doesn’t look like a man who would lie to women. I hit pause and go to the Taylor Institute website and click on another video. It is required viewing for all men and women undergoing cosmetic procedures in his clinic. Dr. Epstein, when I interviewed him on the same day I interviewed Dr. Kramer, told me it discourages almost 20 percent of prospective clients. He did not sound happy about it. I’d asked him if they continued showing it to prospective patients after Dr. Taylor died. “No,” he said, firmly. “The partners agreed it was no longer . . . expedient . . . to do so.”