As she suspected all along, there are definitely insects living in her hair. She tosses her head, but the tiny creatures hang on tight, happy in the splendid nest they’ve made of her damp locks and greasy scalp. They must love that—the oil and the sweat, the rancid smell of it. A perfect place to lay their scummy eggs and raise their revolting young. A breeding ground beyond compare.
—
On the fifth day of her illness Klara finds her lying on top of the bedclothes like a blown leaf, curled and weightless. She’s on her right side with her head and shoulders turned to the left—thrown back against the bunched duvet—wearing an oversize T-shirt that’s twisted around her torso.
Klara stands in the doorway, vacillating between a state of alarm and the thought that her employer has merely had a late night. She’s tempted to simply shut the door and get on with the cleaning. The woman has always been pale and thin, a poor specimen in Klara’s opinion. But even in the half-light Klara can see that something isn’t right. Mrs. Gilbert’s skin has a bluish tint, and her sunken eyes are beyond the preserve of even a very bad hangover.
“Mrs. Gilbert? You are feeling okay?”
She steps into the room and stands at the foot of the bed. Something has happened to Mrs. Gilbert’s hair. Her long, beautiful hair is gone, chopped off as if by a hatchet. The pitiful mess that remains is plastered in clumps to her scalp. This above all else strikes at Klara’s core. She leans over the bed and takes hold of Jodi’s wrist.
“Mrs. Gilbert,” she says. “Please. Wake up.”
She gives the wrist a firm shake. The eyes open and a shudder passes through the wraithlike form. Klara lets go and crosses herself. She hurries out of the room to look for the phone.
Later, after the ambulance has come and gone, Klara goes into the bathroom and finds the missing hair—a soft, dark mass mounded on the floor. Flung into a corner are the pinking shears that did the damage.
—
She’s sitting up in bed, resting back against a wedge of pillows. Clear pale daylight pours through the window, heightening every detail of the small room: the laundry mark a black smudge on her turned-back sheet, the soft weave of her blue blanket, the mint-colored walls showing patches of discoloration, on her bedside locker the spreading poinsettia, on the window ledge the speckled lilies whose sweet, rotting smell has been invading her dreams.
Her bedpan is gone and so are the IV tubes. Yesterday, before breakfast, she made her first solo trip to the washroom. There she found her toothbrush, hairbrush, and assorted toiletries in a zippered bag beside the sink. She doesn’t know who fetched them for her or who brought the plant or the flowers. People have been coming and going all the while. In the beginning she was barely aware of them. She’d wake up and see someone standing by her bed or sitting in the chair in the corner, and then she’d drop off and be gone again.
One of the nurses, the one with the gappy teeth, has just been in to take her temperature and give her a scolding. “You do know, Miss Brett, that when you first came in we thought we might lose you. Why did you let yourself get so dehydrated? You ought to know that with flu you need to drink plenty of fluids. You should have told someone you were sick. Your friends are all very concerned. Any one of them would have been happy to look in on you, bring you some juice, help you wash your hair.”
It’s still a shock to look at herself in the mirror. She has no memory of wielding the shears and no sense of the thoughts that might have been going through her head. What she does recall is the satisfaction she felt at seeing her hair on the floor, knowing it was separate, not a part of her anymore, no longer attached. All her memories from the days of her illness are disjointed like this. But one thing she does know is that a lot of people were trying to get in touch with her. She remembers ringing, buzzing, and knocking, messages and conversations. In particular a conversation with Dr. Ruben—him saying how sorry he was about Todd, how he hated to disturb her at such a time, how he had something to tell her, something that would at least give her one less thing to worry about.
What is it that she doesn’t need to worry about? She tries to remember. It’s playing at the edge of her mind like the fragment of a tune. And there’s Dr. Ruben in her mind’s eye in his white coat with his slight stoop, the words coming out of his mouth. “Test results.” That’s what he called to tell her. Todd’s test results have come back negative. A message from beyond the grave. Todd died a healthy man and left his women uninfected. One less thing to worry about.
Mercifully, the nurse has gone away and left her in peace. She needs to close her eyes and think about the visit from Harry LeGroot, who came by after lunch to bring her the news.
“So. You’re back in the world,” Harry said, sitting on the edge of her bed smelling of the outside world—tobacco, fresh air, damp wool—his face ruddy, his hair a sleek silver pelt. He told her about the call he’d received from Stephanie, who’d been alerted by Klara, who had tried to get in touch with Todd. “As far as Klara knew, Todd was alive and well. I guess she missed the story in the papers, and apparently you didn’t get around to filling her in.” He found this odd, judging from the way he was looking at her, but he didn’t prod her any further. Nor did he ask about her hair. The main reason for his visit, he said, was to tell her that the gunmen had been found.
“The gunmen,” he repeated, responding to her blank stare. “The perps. There are two of them. They’re being held pending their bail hearing.”
She didn’t like the way he was speaking to her—patiently, carefully, telling her this in the gentlest possible way. It could only mean that the men had talked, that all the dots had been connected.
“They corroborated what we already knew,” Harry said. “That Dean Kovacs hired them and paid them to do this thing.”
What was he saying? And why was he smiling? He appeared to be enjoying her confusion. Maybe he wanted to trick her into confessing. Of course. That’s why he’d come to the hospital when he could have waited a day or two and seen her at his office. Catch her out while she was still drugged and disoriented. But she’d been planning to confess—that had been her intention all along—and she would have done so already if not for her illness. He didn’t have to trick her to get at the truth.
But Harry was on a roll now, warming to his subject, speaking with gusto as he told her that the men were local hoods with rap sheets as long as her arm who had identified Dean as the one who had hired them, but that nobody needed to take their word for it because there was plenty of evidence to back them up.
“Phone calls. Bank transactions. Kovacs was a fool. He left a paper trail a mile long.”
Harry went on to say that they were stubbornly pleading their innocence, these two saps, maintaining loudly and energetically that they hadn’t followed through. Had they been hired by Dean to do the job? Yes. Had they actually done it? No. When he told her this he laughed and slapped his knee. It never failed to amuse him, he said, the lies that criminals would tell in their desperation to clear themselves. Even when they’d been caught red-handed they’d say anything, absolutely anything.
—
As she regains her physical strength, her mental acuity also makes a comeback. At first she has no idea how to think about it, the reprieve that she’s been granted, the technicality that has given her back her life. Technicality is the word for it, too. She is not one to attribute things like this to a higher power looking out for her. She doesn’t disbelieve in God, but there’s no reason to think that God would intervene on her behalf and not on Dean’s. If God were the judge he would have to find them equally guilty.
She remembers now her phone conversations with Dean. All that rage and fury. She thought nothing of it at the time. It seemed to her that he merely wanted to vent. He was Todd’s oldest friend after all—how could she take him seriously? As it turns out, however, there are depths to Dean that she never fathomed. Clearly, she underrated him. But then, as someone who has no children, she must be forgiven for overlooking the pa
rental imperative, the compulsion to safeguard one’s offspring at whatever cost. And not being a man, she can never fully grasp the kind of macho posturing that Dean was engaged in, which no doubt played a part in leading him astray, in prompting him to carry things too far.
She inclines toward the view that Dean’s men really are the culprits, that their plea of innocence amounts to just what Harry says—a desperate attempt to clear themselves. And what does that say about Alison? It could be that Alison was not to be trusted, had no intention of honoring their deal. Or maybe she just caved in at the sight of all that money. It’s also possible that Alison did pay Renny and that Renny was the shirker. On the other hand, Alison and Renny may have both followed through and done what they were paid to do. Or they may at least have meant to follow through. Jodi would prefer to think the best of them. She is not inclined to doubt either Alison’s sincerity or Renny’s zeal for his work. Still, all she can do is speculate, because the truth will never be known, and besides, in a case like this the truth is relative, complex, tainted. The only thing she knows for sure, the one thing she can count on, is that she won’t be getting a refund. If she wants to know why Alison is avoiding her, well, that may be her answer.
—
Once home from the hospital, after a day or two has passed, when she can muster the strength to face down the blinking light on her telephone, she finds among her messages one from her brother Ryan. Typically, Ryan has been out of touch and knows nothing of recent events, is just checking in, happens to be thinking about her, and will call again. That’s Ryan for you. She’s sorry to have missed him, but she has long since learned to keep Ryan in perspective and not tie herself in knots over his comings and goings. Thanks, of course, to Gerard Hartmann.
Odd how life can hand you these unexpected gifts. She went to Gerard in the first place as part of her training but can’t dispute the fact that during her work with him she peered through the lens of her own eye and discovered important things about herself, for instance her terrific ability to shut out what she didn’t want to see, forget what she didn’t want to know, put a thing out of her mind and never think about it again. In short, to live life as if certain events had never come to pass.
Every shrink knows that it’s not the event itself but how you respond to it that tells the story. Take ten assorted individuals, expose them all to the same life trial, and they will each suffuse it with exquisite personal detail and meaning. Jodi is the one who never thought about it again. Not once. Not ever. What happened to Jodi in the distant place of her childhood qualifies without a doubt as well and truly forgotten, left behind, defunct, as good as eradicated. Or so she might believe if she hadn’t studied psychology. In the end she had to accept that even if you forget that’s not the same as if it never happened. The slate is not entirely wiped clean; you can’t reclaim the person you were beforehand; your state of innocence is not there to be retrieved. The experience you’ve had may be unwanted, may amount to nothing but damage and waste, but experience has substance, is factual, authoritative, lives on in your past and affects your present, whatever you attempt to do about it. That pickle jar you threw away all those years ago may have gone to the landfill, but it still exists out there. It may be broken, even crushed, but it hasn’t disappeared. It may be forgotten, but forgetting is just a habit.
In this analogy the landfill is the unconscious mind. Not the collective unconscious but the personal unconscious—your own individual, private, idiosyncratic unconscious wherein every object is inscribed with your name and stamped with your number, the unconscious from whence objects can fly at you unannounced—as one flew at her that day while she waited for the elevator after telling Gerard her dream about Darrell. To her credit, and it says a lot about her presence of mind, she did not overlook the value of the event as an object lesson in psychology. Indeed, she got it in a breathtaking flash: The unconscious mind is not just a theory in a book, not some trumped-up paradigm or overblown fancy, but as real as the nose on your face, as real as a pickle jar. According to Jung, everything in the unconscious seeks outward expression; an inner situation that is not made conscious will manifest in outward events as fate. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus made a similar proposition when he said that character is destiny.
How pleased Gerard would be to learn that her dream had ignited this valuable childhood memory. Here at last was something he could get between his teeth, and he had been edging for it, had sensed that something was waiting in the wings, had forged ahead with patience and purpose as if anticipating this very moment, the falling of this very ax. She wondered what cues he might have picked up, and she would have liked to ask, but as it turned out she never did take Gerard into her confidence, decided against it. Instead, she held the secret close and failed to ever mention it, preferring in the end to keep it in a shut box and starve it of oxygen. This was a choice that she considered to be very much her prerogative and even in her best interests. Her training told her that such things need to be aired, but in the balance she was still the same person, her childhood still a source of happy memories. In life’s lunchbox there is no such thing as a hundred percent, and ninety-nine percent is downright providential. The only thing she needed to do was deal with the one percent blight, find a way to contain it.
Abruptly, she ended all contact with her older brother, and ever since, over the span of decades, has avoided him entirely, steeled herself against his lobbies and appeals, set him aside without mercy. He knows the reason why; there was never any need to explain. What he did to her was short-lived—a juvenile blunder, a pubescent tic—but some things must not be forgiven.
Nor would she ever forgive herself. Her parents knew nothing, she was sure of that; they would not have put up with such behavior in a child of theirs, and she never could shift any blame onto them. It was she who should have stopped him before he got to Ryan—and she knew without a doubt that he had. Ryan’s nightmares began literally overnight. His tantrums were spectacular and without precedent. He’d been such a pliable child. Maybe the adolescent Darrell had considered the younger sibling to be less of a security risk. Maybe he was merely exploiting his options. Quite possibly there was nothing going on in his head and it all came down to glands. Whatever the case, the deed was done and the grown-up Ryan, like Jodi, was out of touch with Darrell and left his name out of every conversation.
Her unspoken pact with Ryan is that neither of them will ever revisit the landmarks, unearth the relics, dig up the ground of things gone wrong. Her measure of Ryan’s early years and what Ryan himself may or may not remember—this is out of bounds, effectively null and void, a history forsaken, a past disavowed. Forgetting is just a habit but it brings peace of mind, and above all Ryan must have peace of mind, must be kept safe, permitted to layer fresh experience over the silence.
As for herself, every morning on waking she gives thanks to the God she doesn’t disbelieve in. Although she can’t credit him with saving her, she needs this outlet for her gratitude. Her freedom is a gift beyond reckoning: that she can still awake each day in her beautiful home, walk barefoot on the thick wool carpets, open the silk-and-linen drapes to the sweep of the horizon, drink a latte made with French roast, go on a ramble with the dog. She is keenly aware—never forgets, even for a moment—that she forfeited all this. Her gratitude is like a hard candy that won’t dissolve in her mouth.
She is grateful for Harry, too, who is working hard on her behalf. A court date is set for probate, and he has papers for her to sign. He tells her that Natasha is suing but that he’s ninety percent sure she will settle out of court. With her baby due in the spring and the trial coming up, Natasha has more than enough on her plate. In any case she, Jodi, can afford to be generous. There will be plenty of money to go around once the apartment house and the office building are sold. Stephanie will be helping with that, and by the time Stephanie is no longer needed, Jodi will be in a position to offer her a decent termination package. Financially it’s Cliff who will be
hardest hit since Todd was far and away his best client. But Cliff is good at what he does, and new clients will come along.
She recognizes changes in herself. There’s been a softening, a coming down to earth, and along with that a greater sense of kinship with her clients. Having understood that she, too, has been willful and greedy and blind and stuck, that she’s been swimming in the soup with them all along, she can only be grateful for their loyalty and kindness. They’ve been putting up with her lapses, asking after her health. The judge brought her flowers and Bergman baked her a pie. Truly.
But the really surprising thing is that all of them, right down to the wayward Mary Mary, are showing less resistance and making more of an effort to work with her. A certain flow has infected them, a readiness and ease. A willingness to take responsibility and move forward is showing itself in their collective attitude, and everything begins with attitude, meaning outlook, belief, the story you tell yourself, as Adler has said. It’s apparent that the changes in her are affecting her clients in turn, and she is now forced to consider that human nature is possibly more yielding than she once supposed. That her hideous fall from grace should end up making her less of a skeptic is a paradox that doesn’t escape her.
It’s odd to think, with Todd gone, that a son of his will inhabit the world in years to come. Would she recognize the boy if she passed him in the street? Will Todd’s features be layered, ghostlike, over his son’s countenance, or will there at least be a sign—a mannerism, something in his posture? She wonders if the boy’s mother will tell him the truth about his family, take him to visit his grandpa in the state penitentiary. In Natasha’s position, Jodi might be tempted to bury the whole egregious mess, never refer to it, invent some fiction to explain Dean’s absence, or better still just forget about Dean, as if he too had died, since forgiving him would be impossible.
The Silent Wife: A Novel Page 25
