The Silent Wife: A Novel

by A. S. A. Harrison

  “Miz Brett,” he says. “Jodi.”

  He’s agitated, twitchy. He circles the room, picking things up and putting them down. The ashtray from Mont St. Michel, a millefiori paperweight, a stack of DVDs. He flips through her copy of American Psychologist. Not looking up he says, “About the murder of your. Ex. Just a few things we. Need to discuss.” His speech is fitful, as if he can’t focus on what he wants to say. His voice is a scratchy contralto that sticks in his throat. His eyeballs move restlessly in the flat planes of his face, beacons to warn the unsuspecting.

  She invites him to sit, pointing to the easy chair most recently occupied by the family man. He alights briefly on the chair arm and then resumes his pacing. His agitation is unsettling. Maybe that’s the point. Placing herself on the sofa, she says in a spirit of protest, “Another detective was here last week. I answered a lot of questions.”

  “I’d hate to disturb you for no. Good reason,” he says. He appraises her with studied insolence, gathering in the leopard-print pumps, manicured nails, pretty pair of molehills, little pointed chin. When his eyes once again meet hers, he continues. “This new piece of information that we happened to. Come across. I don’t think you mentioned it to my colleague. Detective Skinner. We were just. Wondering. You know.”

  He moves to the window and turns his back to it, faces into the room. “Can you verify that the deceased. Mr. Todd Jeremy Gilbert. Your ex. At the time of his death had initiated eviction proceedings against you? Was in the process of legally evicting you? From this property. This apartment. Of which he was the sole and rightful. Owner. Can you verify that, Miz Brett? Jodi?”

  He talks so fast that his speech is slurred, and yet he halts abruptly after each of his odd clumps of words, filling in the pauses by shifting his weight, looking around the room, fingering the surfaces near at hand. Backlit by the sky, he’s standing in a blaze of light that all but blinds her. She can’t make out his features, can’t see his eyes. How has he managed to do this? Put her at a disadvantage on her own stomping grounds. She ought to get up and adjust the drapes or move to a different chair. One of those Marlboros would be good right now.

  “Yes,” she says. “He was trying to evict me.”

  “But you weren’t planning to leave. You didn’t want to leave and you knew that you didn’t have to leave because you had. Other ideas. You were making your own. Plans. If he wasn’t around to file an order. With the sheriff, say. Then there wouldn’t be an eviction. Would there, Miz Brett? Jodi. And here you are. Still here. Which proves your point.”

  “It’s your point,” she says.

  He continues. “And not only would there be. No eviction. You would stand to inherit. As long as he was out of the way before his marriage to Miz Kovacs. Before he got around to. Changing his will. Timing was everything. Before he could evict you. Before he could marry the other. Woman.”

  Her guilt is hanging on her like that moldy Dior gown she bought last year at auction. He may think that she’s a spoiled bitch who would sooner do murder than give up her little indulgences, but the fact is she has a highly developed sense of economy. Contrary to the impression he’s no doubt formed of her, she was not spawned in a wealthy home and did not grow up in luxury. In the early years with Todd, when he had no money, she was the one who managed, found ways to cut corners. She even made a point of learning how to cook. Psycho cop might be surprised to know this about her. He ought to try her spicy pork sauté with pickled cabbage. Or her homemade gnocchi with truffle sauce.

  He’s waiting for her to speak, but she says nothing. Her default mode when bullied or badgered is silence. The second you open your mouth to defend yourself, they’ve got you. Got you on the run. She knows this intuitively, has always known it.

  He believes in her guilt, she understands that, and would like to formalize his belief by placing her under arrest. But if he were planning to arrest her he wouldn’t be wasting his time with all this bluster. What he doesn’t get is that she’s not going to crack. If he thinks she’s an easy target he should think again. She is not the confessional type. Instead of churning her up or breaking her down, the interrogation is making her numb. The more he talks the number she gets.

  “Let me tell you something,” he says. “You can’t inherit from the man you. Murdered. Maybe you didn’t know that. Miz Brett. Jodi.”

  She has the sensation that he’s far away, on the other side of a gorge, a malevolent child throwing sticks and stones. His aim is good but his missiles lose force across the distance and end up falling at her feet. Maybe he senses this. He’s on the move again, coming away from the window to stand in front of her. She can see his face clearly now—his eyes floating high in their sockets, his lips twitching in tender disdain.

  “Whatever you do you should stay put,” he says. “You’ll be seeing us again in the very near. Future.”

  With this parting shot he slouches to the door and lets himself out. She waits a moment and then stands up and tries to breathe. As far as she can tell no oxygen is passing through her lungs.

  —

  In the following days she’s suspended in a tyranny of waiting. Time is pressurized, a force of unbearable impact; it seems that she’s grabbed and squeezed by every ruthless second. Food has no taste and she eventually stops eating. Her daily workout saps what little energy she has, and so she gives that up too. Even alcohol has lost its appeal, though she continues to use it as a medicinal drip, grateful for its sedative effects. Unable to look after herself she turns her attention to the dog, making him special meals and taking him on long rambling walks. As if to make up for her apathy, his appetites are keener than ever.

  She’s impressed by the fact that life goes on around her undiminished, that people have the wherewithal to give each day their best shot, inhabit their lives with a show of spirit. She respects them for it. They have their problems, she knows, as everyone does, but somehow they manage to keep themselves going. Compared to her, even her clients are doing well. They at least have left themselves openings for forward movement and future alternatives. If Miss Piggy enjoys her secret life, if the judge has divided loyalties, if the prodigal son and Mary Mary refuse to play the game, if Cinderella craves attention, if Sad Sack can’t accept his limitations, if Bergman won’t give up her dream and Jane Doe won’t give up her marriage—they are still, each of them, making a better job of things than she is.

  All that she knows or imagines about prison clatters around in her head, a kaleidoscope of vulgar prospects and showy threats. Isolated, with no one to confide in, she’s given up on herself, fallen prey to a ruinous doomsday mentality. The trial will be a public spectacle; every detail of her life with Todd will be fodder for public consumption. And afterward, when the uproar has died down and people have moved on, long after that, she will still be locked up, trading her mashed potatoes for lipstick or aspirin and doing unspeakable things in the interest of self-preservation.

  When the family man arrives again at her door, she greets him with a drink in hand and a ferment of reaction. The taste of her stomach is in her mouth, as if she were in a plummeting elevator. She surrenders to an unbecoming sort of cowering subservience, but that at least is tempered by a trickle of annoyance. She’s surprised that some part of her can still resist.

  “Forgive the intrusion,” he says, stepping into the foyer.

  Dusk is falling and her living room is a well of shadow. She switches on a table lamp and turns up the gas flame. They take the seats they occupied before—her on the sofa, him in the wing chair—as if that first visit was a rehearsal and now they’ve come to the real thing.

  “Can I offer you a drink, Detective? I’m sorry but I can’t remember your name.” She began on the iced vodka at lunchtime, and although her mind is perfectly clear, her words collide as they tumble out of her mouth.

  “Skinner,” he says. “I’ll have to pass on the drink, thanks, much as I’d like to join you.”

  She’d forgotten about his inane civility. He
’s come to arrest her but he’s going to do it politely.

  “I don’t imagine the past little while has been easy for you,” he says. “Please believe me when I say that we don’t want to add to your distress. I know that my colleague has been here to see you as well, and I’m sorry we’ve had to put you through these repeated interviews. But, as you know, our first priority as always is to find the guilty party and make an arrest.”

  He’s leading up to it now—the moment when he’ll put her in handcuffs and take her away. It’s what he’s here for, though given his apparent sympathy, maybe he’ll forgo the handcuffs and deprive her neighbors of the spectacle. It’s a good thing she has a few drinks under her belt. Her intestines are roiling but she’d feel much worse if she were sober. The thing to do is top up her glass while she still has the chance.

  “The point is that we have our case and it’s a pretty solid one,” he says. “We hit some stumbling blocks at first. It was hard to believe that something like this could happen without there being someone who could ID the car. But it came together in the end.”

  He doesn’t say how it came together and she doesn’t ask. When she stands up and slinks toward the kitchen, he raises his voice to cover first the distance between them and then the sound of the ice cubes as they clatter into the bucket. In the end he’s practically shouting.

  “Normally, of course, the victim’s family and friends are relieved when we make an arrest. But sometimes the news is unwelcome, even disturbing. It all depends on the identity of the suspect. In this case, as it happens, the suspect is someone who was very close to the victim.”

  She can’t believe the way he’s beating around the bush. How can you be a policeman if you can’t even make an arrest? Standing at the bar top she throws back what’s left in her glass before refilling it and wonders how it will be to wake up in prison with a hangover.

  “The thing is,” he says, “I don’t want to have you reading about it in the papers without forewarning you.” He lowers his voice abruptly as she returns to her place on the sofa, fresh drink in hand. “I understand that you’ve known Dean Kovacs for a long time.”

  “Who?” she asks.

  He clears his throat. One eyebrow shoots up. “Dean Kovacs. Isn’t he an old friend?”

  “What does Dean have to do with it?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We’ve placed him under arrest.”

  “You’re not saying you’ve arrested Dean Kovacs.”

  “I’m sorry. I knew it would come as a blow. If you don’t mind my saying so, ma’am, you’re looking very pale.”

  “Dean didn’t kill Todd,” she says.

  “You’re right, of course, in that he didn’t pull the trigger. But he hired the men who did. It might help if you drank some coffee. How about a glass of water?”

  “Dean,” she says. “You think Dean killed Todd.”

  “If you don’t mind, Miss Brett, I’ll just get you a glass of water. Please don’t try to stand up.”

  —

  She feels now as if she’s been staring into the sun. She saw herself as different from all those others who commit crimes, in a league of her own, subject to a higher justice, but the truth is she’s been burning out her retinas in a staggering feat of vanity and pride. Her thoughts have been simplistic and self-serving, the musings of a child in a narcissistic, preempathic phase of development. She made assumptions, far too many of them. Assumed, for example, that she was at the center of it, with the possibilities and probabilities orbiting her and her alone. Assumed that the game she was playing had a rule book, that she was operating in a known field where only certain outcomes were permissible.

  She, Jodi, happens to like Dean Kovacs. He’s a nice enough man, if a little misguided. She certainly has nothing against him. She may be a touch off-kilter these days, slightly out of whack, but she’s not without her principles, not depraved. To see an innocent man destroyed for her own wrongdoing is not something she bargained on, not something she can live with.

  Damn Dean. Damn him. What did he say or do to bring this on himself, what flag has he been waving to attract this kind of attention from the police? The family man would tell her nothing. “I can’t give you any details just yet, I’m afraid, Ms. Brett. I’m very sorry but I just can’t release that information. Not at the moment.” She hates this. This ludicrous turn of events that’s ruining everything. Trust Dean to come blundering into her private affairs. He never did have much sense, Dean. He’s a meddler and a blowhard. She could almost allow him to rot in jail. Almost, almost.

  She puts on a jacket and takes the dog to the water, where they walk along a stretch of beach in the onrushing gloom. The sky is a heaving, turbulent mass with dark clouds billowing up from the horizon. A bitter wind tosses the water and streaks along the shore. The mood that overtakes her is familiar, a sense of being adrift in an empty existence. This is Jodi’s hollow core, her unfortunate place of fundamental truth, a domain that she conceals beneath her mantle of optimism and buries in the rounds of daily life. Here lives Jodi, the Jodi who knows that we thrive and prosper only to the degree that we can manipulate our personal circumstance. This Jodi is rarely seen. But Alison saw and exploited this Jodi. So few things are what they seem to be.

  Her home, when she returns to it, strikes her as the lair of some repellent animal. Klara was in just the other day and gave the place her usual going-over, but what’s been left undone is magnified in Jodi’s fermenting imagination. It’s the stench that hits her first, the coffee grounds and overripe fruit, and then, wherever she looks there is filth—grime in the drains, mold between the tiles. She sets to work with a bucket and rags, steel wool, a toothbrush. Uses disinfectant to scour the tiles and the drains and the trash receptacles. She moves through the rooms collecting objects—photographs, table lamps, candlesticks, carvings, doorstops, and bookends—which she places centrally for cleaning on sheets of newspaper. She understands even as she labors that her home is basically pristine, that her sense of a mission is something she’s contrived, to do with the illusion of taking control and making things right.

  By the time she’s ready for bed her mind is made up. In the morning she’ll turn herself in. It’ll be easy. All she has to do is give the family man a call—she still has his card—and tell him about her arrangement with Alison. Whatever happens after that will be up to the police and the lawyers and the judge and the jury. They will do with her as they see fit. Justice will be in their hands and she will be off the hook, no longer responsible. She conceives this plan in a flurry of inevitability. This is what it’s come down to, and she can almost feel glad about it, almost relieved. At least she’ll be free of all the doubt and fear. And in the meantime she can look forward to the family man’s reaction. That alone will be worth it, catching him out in all his polished conceit.

  But her sleep is fitful and during the night her agitation ignites and spreads. By morning a fire rages in her chest and throat, her head is in the jaws of a vise, and her muscles are in shreds. In spite of the sweat pouring out of her, a chill wind is rippling through her bloodstream. She alternates between huddling under the bedclothes and heaving them aside, until at last she is forced out of bed by the dog’s breath on her face and the little yips he gives when he needs attention. With a clammy hand she picks up the phone and cancels her morning clients. She calls the pet sitter, who agrees to come by and take Freud off her hands, and then she calls the dog walker to say that the dog will be staying with the pet sitter. Making the calls exhausts her. When she wakes up again it’s dark outside and the dog is gone. She’s covered in sweat, tangled in her damp sheets. It’s an effort to get to her feet. She makes her way to the bathroom, swallows a sip of water, stands over the toilet bowl, throws up a small amount of bile. Gets back into bed on the other side.

  Time passes. She notes that it’s light outside and then dark again. She recalls hearing the phone and someone buzzing from the lobby. She wonders if it’s the weekend, but that
may have come and gone. She moves back to her own side of the bed, which is now dry, and wishes that someone would bring her a glass of ginger ale or an orange Popsicle. That’s what her mother used to give her when she was sick in bed as a child, though she was never sick for very long. The girl she used to be was resilient. Back then, she believed that only good things would happen to her in life. That was the promise, and when Todd came along, he was the proof. Here was a man with dreams and the will to make them real. In the beginning they were so very taken with each other, so confident of their place in the scheme of things. She didn’t know then that life has a way of backing you into a corner. You make your choices when you’re far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows. You choose a career and other careers are lost to you. You choose a mate and commit to loving no other.

  When she dozes she dreams of strangers, unknown men and women telling her things that she can’t hear or doesn’t understand. She gets up, toasts a piece of bread, butters it, drops it into the garbage disposal, goes back to bed. Now she’s in Florida giving a lecture on eating disorders. Someone has died from an overdose of sleeping pills. Alison is pregnant and she, Jodi, is somehow responsible. She trudges through blackness, swims upstream, falls into a pit and struggles to get out. She and Todd are living in their old digs, the little apartment where they were happy when they were first together. She’s sorting through an array of household goods, putting items into boxes one by one, but there are too many things and the movers are banging on the door. The scene changes and Todd is saying that he’s going to marry Miss Piggy. He hopes she doesn’t mind. When she wakes up she feels utterly alone. The taste in her mouth makes her think of mice.