The Silent Wife: A Novel

by A. S. A. Harrison

  It had long been her intention to repeat the conference experience, but somehow she never got around to it. Loyalty to Todd was part of it—who would look after him while she was gone? But that was just a surface concern; the underpinnings were undoubtedly bleaker. Possessiveness. Paranoia. A reluctance to give him more rope than he already had. All familiar sentiments, and although they mostly stayed below the level of daily awareness, they no doubt played a part in keeping her at home.

  It came down to a choice between Anger Management in the historic city of Winchester in the south of England and Emotions, Stress, and Aging in sunny Jacksonville, Florida. She was more interested in anger management, which she’d never had the opportunity to study. With a conference under her belt and some additional reading, she could work with clients needing help in this area. But after checking the weather network and talking to her travel agent about price points, she opted for Emotions, Stress, and Aging, consoling herself with the prospect of palm trees and tropical breezes.

  Thus it happens that she finds herself in a Jacksonville hotel room coming awake to the insistent humming of the telephone on her bedside table. The room is black, with no light showing anywhere, not even around the drapes or under the door. She rolls onto her side to look at the digital clock with its toxic green numbers. Not yet six. Sunrise at least an hour away.

  Since arriving the day before yesterday she hasn’t thought about why she’s here or what could be going on back home. Forgetting is easy in the world of the conference, which is uncomplicated and undemanding, a world where real life gives way to endless diversions and distractions. The lecture rooms are filled with warm natural light, patio doors open onto gardens of flowering shrubs, and when she steps outside she can lift her face to the sun and catch the scent of the ocean. The most she ever has to do is sit comfortably in a padded chair and listen to interesting presentations, join the throng in the restaurant for lunch, dress for dinner on the town. She shares no history with anyone here. Her background and circumstances are off the radar. For all anyone knows she could have dropped down from outer space or materialized out of thin air.

  The ringing telephone does not belong in this picture. She closes her eyes and waits for it to stop. When the room is again silent, she lets out her breath in a slow, deliberate stream that’s like a sigh and wills herself back to sleep, but deep sleep is evasive now, so busy is her dreaming mind, so filled with strange and disturbing scenes—milling people, bright lights, someone running. It can’t be more than a few minutes before the phone starts up again. Its low urgent sound in her dreams is someone sobbing before it fully wakes her. Blinking needlessly in the dark she gets out of bed and gropes her way to the bathroom.

  Later, when she’s eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant with a group of colleagues, someone approaches from behind and touches her shoulder. It’s one of the conference heads, a friendly woman who has made a point of introducing herself to everyone, sometimes repeatedly.

  “There’s a call for you,” she says. “You can take it in the lobby.”

  28

  HIM

  For the past three and a half days his mind has been churning out Ilona-shaped thoughts, and the Ilona-shaped thoughts have been forming Ilona-shaped patterns, like metal filings in a magnetic field. The three and a half days were a Friday, a Saturday, a Sunday, and a Monday morning, days when he neglected to tell Natasha that he loved her, took her shopping with bad grace, refused to help around the house, got through a twelve-pack of tall boys, and masturbated every time he took a shower. Over these few short days the unsuspecting Ilona has reached a pinnacle of erotic allure in his engorged imagination. The focus of outrageous projections, she has achieved the status of a female counterpart, his match in every way, a positive to his negative and a negative to his positive, the piece of the jigsaw that renders his life complete. Even he can discern the sick liability of his musings, but only in lucid moments, which he resolutely shakes off.

  The restaurant on South Dearborn, where Ilona agreed to meet him, is intimate and stylish. He foresees the two of them locking eyes as she raises a glass to her lips, pictures her chewing on small morsels of costly flesh. She’s never tasted a fresh oyster, has no notion of what a really good bottle of wine can do for a person, of this he is confident, just as he knows that, once indoctrinated, she’ll become insatiable, addicted to all that he has to offer. Even as he emerges from his office and turns toward the parking lot, he swaggers. It doesn’t occur to him that she could stand him up, that conceivably she already has a man in her life, that she might have seen through him, come to her senses, changed her mind. On the contrary, he has an idea that he’s heading for the assignation of his life, the rendezvous that’s going to turn everything around. Though she doesn’t yet know it, Ilona is the chosen one, the one who will save him from the mess that he’s so haplessly fallen into. Ilona—skinny, undiscovered, wary like a cat, credulous like a child, with little sense of her own beauty and power—is the answer to all his problems. He jingles his car keys and laughs out loud, expelling a cloud of mist into the wintry air. Already he’s counting down the minutes, making of his actions a deliberate choreography. He slides into his car and starts the engine, flicks on his wipers and waits for them to clear away the frost, drives to the curb, and curses the oncoming traffic. Checks his teeth in the rearview mirror. Puts on his right blinker. Pops a lozenge into his mouth.

  He’s feeling remarkably well, better than he has in weeks. His lesion has all but disappeared, the itching attacks have subsided, and he’s worrying less about his test results. He was really frightened at first, beside himself for a day or two, but now he’s regained his composure. Gunning the engine he hits the power knob on the radio and catches the opening bars of “Unchained Melody.” There’s no resisting the sea of longing invoked by the plaintive music and Bobby Hatfield’s fluid tenor. He thinks of a girl he knew in high school, revisits the smell of her hair, the citronella tang of the cheap gel that drove him wild. Maybe it’s her he longs for; who’s to say? He’s aware of boundaries blurring and fading, the boundaries that separate past and present, those that distinguish Ilona from Natasha from Jodi from the girl in high school. And then the song ends and he’s back in his car driving north toward Roosevelt.

  He sticks with the curbside lane and brakes for a stoplight. The car just ahead is a Ferrari, streamlined and low to the ground, exciting and seductive. He’s gripped by a fervent desire to own the very car, an ardent wish to be magically transported to its driver’s seat, to take his place behind its wheel. His Porsche—which he has always doted on—strikes him as conservative, sedate, even priggish, the choice of a man who has lost his passion. How could this have happened? When did he change?

  It’s nearly time now. Only seconds are left. If only he knew it he wouldn’t waste them on resolutions that can never come to pass—the notion of trading in his car, disposing of deadwood, getting himself free. He believed that Natasha had made him young again, but now he understands. The women who start to think they own you and the obligations that can break a man. You have to keep moving in life. You have to move fast so they can’t pin you down.

  When the first impact comes he thinks it’s a rock. Someone has thrown a rock through his driver’s-side window. The sound explodes in his left ear, and fragments of glass spray the side of his face.

  “What the fuck,” he says aloud.

  He touches his cheek as he turns his head to look. Seeing the small round hole with its halo of shattered glass, he thinks he must have been shot, though he feels no pain. His eyes telescope and the car idling beside him at the traffic light blazes into his field of vision. He registers the open window, the head in the woolen cap, the penetrating gaze, the flare of the gun. He doesn’t know the man, but no questions arise in his mind.

  It isn’t true what they’re going to say—that he didn’t see it coming, never knew what hit him. Still, it happens very fast. Delinquent images burst on his mental screen; this is all t
he dying he has time for. Paradoxically, in the heightened moment when his unborn son should matter most, the child he doesn’t know and will never meet means less to him than all the others. His doting mother and even his aberrant father. Cliff and Harry, his best buddies. Natasha, who appears to him as a child, holding her daddy’s hand; Natasha and Dean, both of them survivors. Even more compelling is the image of Ilona waiting at the restaurant, her disappointment building by the minute, with no one to save her from it. And Jodi as she was on the day he came home from the country, prone and splayed under the open sky. Beautiful, singular Jodi. If he had the choice to stay he would do it for her. But there are no choices left to him now. Time hangs suspended, and yet it’s about to end. Death should be a seduction, not a rape. Given one more minute he could do so much. Even the guilty are allowed to make a phone call, send a message. How alive he feels, how brightly he shines, like a lit fuse, a firecracker about to go off. What he wouldn’t give for a minute more, just one ordinary minute tacked crudely onto the end of his life.

  PART TWO

  HER

  “This is Jodi Brett,” she says, holding the phone as if it were a dead rodent.

  The voice of a despot comes back at her, as pronounced and menacing as if it were booming from a speaker in the lobby. He’s calling from the police, he says. He’s afraid he has bad news. He wonders if she’s sitting down.

  In fact, she is standing primly upright, spine erect, feet together, hips at a precise right angle to the reception desk, staring sightlessly into the glare of the hotel’s glass entrance doors. She doesn’t see what difference it makes if she is sitting or standing and feels impatient with the show of concern. If he cared about her welfare as he pretends, he wouldn’t have been calling her at all hours of the night, ruining her sleep.

  She makes an attempt to cut through his equivocation. “I’m in the middle of breakfast. What is it you have to say to me?”

  Still he won’t come to the point. “I understand you’re attending a conference down there.” His voice is thick and polished. She can see the words rolling off his tongue, each one a fat slug that crawls into her ear.

  “Yes,” she says. “Is that a problem?”

  “Ms. Brett,” he says. “It’s of the utmost urgency that you return home at once.”

  Now comes the sound of Todd’s name, large and soft as it leaves his slurry lips, and now a vertiginous image of milk pouring out of a bucket, an image that conveys nothing but is nonetheless dense with nausea and a reeling sensation. By the time her eyelids flutter open, her head is resting on a cushion, and a crowd of faces bobs above her. She feels lost and bewildered as a great many mouths cluck and murmur with concern. But when she’s taken by the arms and brought to standing, she quickly comes to her senses, and once again she is face-to-face with the crushing facts. Fact number one: Todd is dead. Which she struggles to assimilate even as she realizes that, fact number two: Her guilt is so transparent that the Chicago police have already hunted her down. There is little doubt in her mind that when she steps off the plane at O’Hare the force will be there waiting for her. She’ll be placed under arrest, possibly handcuffed, and taken away to a lockup in some godforsaken sector of the city, wherever it is they have jails.

  Given these certainties, she finds it surprising that she doesn’t feel inclined to run. Rent a car, drive away, find a border to cross, fade into anonymity. She has the instincts of a homing pigeon. Even though nothing but danger awaits her, she can’t abandon all that she knows and loves. At most she’d like to wait a few days, enjoy another glass of wine at the restaurant on the beach, savor the tropical heat and the scented air for a while longer. This is a prospect that greatly appeals to her, but it won’t come to pass. They would only plague her with phone calls, or worse, send someone to escort her home.

  After reassuring the detective, who’s been waiting on the line, and after seeking out the conference head to say there’s been a death in the family, and after the conference head has extended condolences and promised to look into a partial refund, Jodi goes to her room to reschedule her flight, forewarn the pet sitter, and pack her things.

  —

  As the plane touches down, drifting snowflakes catch the lights on the runway and animate the night sky. She’s still in the halter dress and wedge sandals that she put on in the distant morning, but she’s had the foresight to carry a trench coat with her. Over the course of the flight she’s downed her allotment of vodka tonics, and her mood has cycled silently through sorrow, despair, and defiance. Now, stepping onto the gangway, pulling her valise behind her, she clings to a fragile bravado. She was not detained while the other passengers disembarked; no men in uniform have so far made an appearance. She understands that it’s just a matter of time, but this at least is going better than expected, and after picking up her luggage without incident, a breath of hope stirs faintly in the smog of her misery.

  Wearing her coat but with legs still bare she exits the airport into the frigid night and joins the lineup for a taxi. The drive home is uneventful. She enters her building and crosses the lobby, rides the elevator to her floor, takes her key out of her purse. There’s a single sharp bark from behind the closed door, and then she’s assaulted by eighty pounds of undiluted joy. The pet sitter, on the other hand, takes one look at her and bursts into tears, distraught over news of the tragedy. She pays the girl and sends her on her way. It feels good to be safely home, and she’s encouraged by her luck.

  With the improvement in her spirits her mind becomes more lucid. She begins to grasp that the failure of the police to waylay her can only mean that her situation is not as dire as she supposed, that getting her home from the conference was merely routine, a matter of procedure. She celebrates with a fresh vodka tonic and feels like eating for the first time since breakfast. The sitter has left some deli meat in the fridge and she uses it to make herself a sandwich, adding pickles and hot mustard. With food in her system her mood levels out. She changes into jeans and brews a pot of coffee. She finds herself intensely curious about the manner of Todd’s death. Even on the plane she couldn’t stop conjecturing, running the phone call through her mind, trying to remember the exact words the policeman used to break the news. There’s been a death . . . there’s been a homicide . . . foul play is involved . . . I’m sorry to inform you that foul play is involved . . . I’m afraid there’s no doubt . . . the evidence leaves no doubt. There was nothing specific, nothing that can help resolve her fever of speculation. But as she moves around the apartment setting things aright, she spies this morning’s Tribune on the coffee table.

  The story is bigger than she anticipated, starting on the front page and flowing over to an inside spread. She didn’t foresee the murder of a small-time property developer as being of any special interest to the public at large, but reporters are using it to get on their hobbyhorses, spinning out copy about the drug trade and the firearm crisis. There’s a lot of madcap speculation—for instance, that the killing was an opportunistic attack by gun-happy, amphetamine-crazed teenagers. Another theory involves the mob. Conjectures aside, the facts of the case are plainly stated.

  A man was gunned down in his car yesterday afternoon as he waited at a stoplight in Chicago’s South Loop. The victim has been identified as Todd Jeremy Gilbert, 46, a local businessman. He was shot in the head at approximately 12:45 PM at the corner of Michigan and Roosevelt. According to eyewitnesses, a vehicle pulled up beside him and one or more gunmen opened fire. Police are seeking a description of the vehicle in question. After the shooting took place, the victim’s car rolled into the intersection, bumped against a curb, and came to a stop. The driver was found slumped over the wheel. No bystanders were harmed.

  She thinks about the lunch-hour traffic, the seclusion afforded by the two cars, the factors that remain as question marks. “One or more gunmen,” the article says. Even their number is a point of speculation. But there would have been two men, one to drive and one to shoot, and no more because a th
ird would have been superfluous, and there was only so much money to go around. Whether or not one of them was Renny, she can’t say. She has the impression that Renny keeps his hands clean, and Alison spoke of recruits. Either way her mental image of the men is vague. She has never met Renny, has never even seen his picture.

  She is struck by the timing at play. A car is idling at a stoplight and shots are fired from its window. In spite of the public setting—a major intersection during the lunch-hour rush—the car disappears before anyone can register what’s happened. This is evident because, otherwise, the police would have a description of it. She thinks about it. The prompt escape could only come about if the light turned green precisely as the killing took place. They must have waited for it. With the seconds fleeing by and their weapon at the ready, they waited for the very instant when the light would turn and they could take off across the intersection.

  She needs to walk through it step by step, to imaginatively reconstruct the phenomenal, shattering event that she is still unable to accept. She pictures him leaving the office, walking to the parking lot, getting into the Porsche, and heading north on Michigan. He’s in the right-hand lane when he stops at the light. He has to be in the right-hand lane because the shooter would be in the passenger seat of the car adjacent. Close to his mark and sure of his aim. Not taking any chances.

  Let’s say that Todd and the perpetrators, idling side by side, are first in line at the traffic light. Todd is oblivious. He has no inkling that he’s become a mark, no clue that he’s in danger. The two men, meanwhile, do not have an exact plan. They’re really just ad-libbing, waiting for the auspicious moment, the ripe opportunity. If necessary, they’ll get out of their car and stalk their prey on foot, but in the best-case scenario it won’t come down to that. The sooner they get this over and done with, the sooner they can go back home and collect their pay.