Young Wives

by Olivia Goldsmith

  She had to blink quickly to clear her eyes, because the car behind her moved up to pass. She almost missed the turn onto Larkspur, but managed to brake and pull the left in time without cutting anyone off. The garden apartments were located at the end of a pretty street with nothing but private houses along it. She pulled up and parked as close to her apartment as she could, and saw her mother, Laura, and Bill were already waiting outside. As she approached them, Bill held out a bag.

  “We got you coffee,” he said, “but I wasn’t sure if you wanted a cruller or a handful of Munchkins.”

  “I didn’t know you were all coming,” Angie said to him and kissed her mom.

  “I didn’t know you were moving,” Bill said. He was a really nice guy. Angie enjoyed working with him. Maybe they could be friends.

  Laura patted her shoulder and Angie reached into her pocket for her new key. “Well, let me show you what the largesse of the WLCC has afforded me,” she told them.

  “‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,’” intoned Bill as Angie threw open the door. She felt grateful that she didn’t have to step over the threshold alone. She had been lucky, compared to a lot of people. She had a job, and now she had a place to live and some potential friends. She wasn’t in the kind of trouble that Jada or poor Michelle were going through.

  “Sometimes it’s best to keep life simple,” she said to Bill as all of them trooped through the three rooms. Then she wondered how simple she could keep it, if she were a single mother.

  “They’re here!” Natalie called out. “I can’t believe they’re on time!” It was the movers, and chaos ensued. Natalie became the boss, of course, suggesting everything from how the linen should be unpacked to which direction Angie should hang her clothes in her closet. At least Natalie had ordered a double mattress and box spring from 1-800-MATTRES and it had just been delivered when the movers left.

  Thank God, Angie thought, that she had almost no other furniture, because Natalie would be putting it just where she didn’t want it. God, she loved her mother, but she didn’t want to have to tell her about her pregnancy. Natalie would cry, then she would take over, and Angie would be told what to do, what doctor should do it, and when. It was hard to stand up against her loving mother when Natalie was blowing at gale force.

  She, Bill, and Laura were struggling to pull the boxes apart while her mother ineptly worked on putting together the rolling bed frame. “Can I offer a hand?” a man’s voice asked. Angie peeked around the side of the mattress carton. It was Michael, dressed in a red sweater and corduroys, not even wearing a jacket despite the cold.

  “Well, you got two,” Bill said. “Why be stingy?”

  Angie was really touched that Michael had showed up, too. He had his family and weekend chores, she was sure, but he took over the bed frame and made it stable, despite two screws missing from the packet. It was almost four o’clock when they were done. The space looked peculiar—not bad, but peculiar—since Angie had a few paintings hung on the walls, and a couple of good lamps but no chairs or a sofa. She had the Egyptian hippo that had been a wedding present, but no shelf to set it on. In fact, aside from the mattress and box spring, the only other piece of furniture she had was the little desk from her bedroom, the desk she’d taken from Natalie’s when she first moved in with Reid. She didn’t even have a chair for it.

  Bill surveyed the rooms. “Very nice,” he said. “Very ethereal. I like the simplicity, as if you’re too spiritual to actually need to sit down.”

  “I don’t need to sit down, I need to lie down,” Angie said.

  “Don’t you want to go out to dinner?” Natalie asked the rest of them. “My treat.”

  Michael had taken off first, before she could even thank him, and Bill and Laura begged off. Angie suspected that it all might have been prearranged, but she was so grateful for their help that she kissed both of them on both cheeks. “Oooh, French kissing,” Bill said, and then he left with a laugh.

  Before she left, Laura stuck her head back in the doorway. “Angie, I just wanted you to know that we have a lot riding on this Jada Jackson case, so I’ve authorized more funds for it. I also contacted a friend of mine from the Yale Childhood Center to help against the social worker of Creskin’s.”

  “That’s great. Thanks, Laura,” Angie said, but she couldn’t help notice the tone of voice Laura had used. It meant: “Deliver on this.” Well, she would. When Angie turned back to her mother, Natalie was looking at her with concern. “Are you sure you don’t want to go out?” she asked. “Just you and me?” Angie closed the door.

  “No,” Angie said. “Really not. I have to lie down.”

  “Well, let me make up your bed,” Natalie said. “I can go out for take-out.” Angie knew she wasn’t going to get rid of her mother without a fight, so she compromised.

  “I’ll make up my bed,” she said, “and then I’ll lie in it.” It reminded her of her earlier thought about her dad and she almost smiled. “How about you get some Chinese in the meantime?”

  “Okay. And to give you some time to rest, I’ll pick up some groceries. You know, just the basics. Coffee, salt, Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream.” Angie laughed and gave her mother a hug.

  “Thanks,” she said, and made her way into the bedroom. After she heard the front door close, she didn’t bother to put on sheets or a pillow. She just lay down, as tired as she had ever been. She wasn’t sure how much of it was emotional, how much of it was from the pregnancy, and how much of it was simply the stress and strain of bending, lifting, and hammering, but it felt good to lie down.

  She wasn’t there long before Jada and Michelle rang the bell. Jada had a covered casserole dish in her hands, while Michelle held a plate of her infamous brownies. The smell from both mixed in her tiny hallway, but Angie tried to ignore her rising nausea. Jada looked at her closely. “Are you lonesome or scared in the new place, or are we just intruding?” she asked. Angie burst into tears and then vomited on the apartment floor.

  Ten minutes later they were all sitting on her bare mattress. Jada had cleaned up the floor and Michelle had cleaned up Angie. She was grateful for these two women and their company and then, completely unexpectedly, she began to tell them the rest of her story: about her stupidity, and the sickness and other symptoms she hadn’t noticed, and then …

  Michelle took her hand. “Oh, Angie! This is just too much. You’re pregnant. By him? The Boston shit bird?”

  “Are you sure?” Jada asked.

  Angie nodded. “And do you know what I keep doing? I keep buying home pregnancy tests. As if the last eleven haven’t been accurate. It’s nuts.”

  “I did that, too,” Jada told her. “With Sherrilee. It was not the right time for me to be pregnant. Remember, Michelle? Everything with Clinton was already pretty much gone. I did not need to be pregnant.”

  “Man, those were some walks we took those mornings,” Michelle said. Jada nodded, and Angie watched the two women exchange a look, a look with worlds of understanding and compassion.

  “You never thought about …” Angie paused. “About ending the pregnancy?”

  “I thought about it every day,” Jada said. “I prayed over it. I also thought about suicide. I prayed over that, too.”

  “You never told me,” Michelle said.

  “I didn’t have those thoughts in the morning, Mich,” Jada said. “Only at night.” Jada looked at Angie. “But I had my other two to think about.” Jada paused for a moment, then took her bottom lip between her teeth. She shook her head. “Now I don’t have any of my babies with me.” She looked back at Angie. “I’m so sorry for your pain,” she said, and that started Angie crying again.

  Michelle rubbed Angie’s hand. “I feel so stupid,” Angie said. “This is such bad, bad timing.”

  Michelle sighed. “I always feel stupid. But doesn’t a lot of what happens, happen at bad times?”

  “Well,” Jada said, “maybe it’s God’s time, not ours. And God always gi
ves us choices.”

  Angie looked up, blew her nose on a Kleenex that Michelle handed her, and stared into Jada’s face. The woman was in danger of losing so much. How could she believe that God was in charge?

  “Hey,” Michelle said, “let me make up this bed. You got sheets?” Angie nodded. “Why don’t you take a shower?” Michelle asked. “Then you can feel fresh in nice clean sheets.” She stood up, and so did Angie. Michelle looked around. “I’d like to wash down these walls,” she said. “And the floor would look good after a real cleaning and waxing.”

  Jada shook her head. “Sterilizing the world again, Michelle?” she asked.

  “Hey, I like to clean, okay? A false sense of accomplishment is better than none at all.”

  When Angie came back from the shower, she did feel better, though whether it was because she was about to sleep, because she was clean, or because she’d come clean was hard to tell. The two women helped her into bed as if she were an invalid. “Thanks for coming over,” Angie said, almost formally. And all three of them looked at each other before they began laughing. “My mom is stopping by with some Chinese food. She should be here soon. You want to join us?”

  Both Michelle and Jada shook their heads. “I haven’t told her yet,” Angie admitted. “I don’t want to say anything until I decide what I’m going to do.”

  Michelle nodded, and Jada patted Angie on the shoulder. “It’s up to you,” she said. “It’s between you and God.”

  “We’ll help you either way,” Michelle said, and Angie knew they meant it.

  31

  Frank gets tough

  Jenna lay face down on the bed, her arms thrown like rags to cover her head. Michelle sat beside her. Her daughter had come in from school and burst into tears without speaking before running up to her bedroom. It took all of Michelle’s self-control to hold herself back for almost ten minutes and give Jenna privacy to cry off some of her feelings. After all, Michelle thought, even though I’m the only one she has to comfort her, I’m part of her pain.

  She had knocked on Jenna’s door, walked in, and sat on the corner of her daughter’s canopied bed. She put her hand on her daughter’s back, in the place between her shoulder blades where, from the time she was tiny, she always liked to be rubbed. But Jenna jerked herself away from under Michelle’s hand as if it were a branding iron. So Michelle just sat at the foot of the bed.

  Since the indictment had hit, and all of them had been pictured in the newspapers and Frank had been on all of the local news programs (looking as much like a criminal as the media made most indicted people look) the children had fallen apart badly. Jenna came home from school either pale and silent or hysterical. And Frankie … Michelle took a deep breath and tried not to audibly sigh. Her son was too young to understand most of what was going on, but not too young to be hurt by name-calling and the fact that no one would play with him at school recess or after school. Plus, there was the loss of Kevon, who—as far as her son was concerned—had abandoned him personally.

  Only Pookie could comfort Frankie, but apparently not well enough. Frankie had begun wetting his bed and woke up crying, cold and shamed when he discovered what he had done. She had thought that poor Jada was worse off than she was; her life was destroyed and her children, at least for the time being, had been stolen from her. But Jada at least had a chance to get it all back.

  Poor Angie, on the other hand, had lost a man she loved, and to her friend who betrayed her. Worst of all was her pregnancy. That poor, poor girl, Michelle thought, and despite it all, she was using her time to help others. She had even helped Michelle. She pushed the thought from her mind. She didn’t want to think about what she was going to have to do about Frank.

  Michelle knew she had to think positively. She was going to the custody hearing and would get to see Jada and Angie triumph. But for her, for Michelle, there could be no triumph. Being with her children and watching them in pain was unbearable. Being with Frank and knowing he was guilty was unbearable. The thought of being without Frank, on her own, stigmatized and jobless, was unbearable.

  Now Michelle reached out and touched her daughter’s ankle. Jenna pulled her foot away but she did, at least, flip over on her back, push up on her elbows, and look at her mother. “Haven’t you ever heard of privacy?” she asked. Michelle nodded. “Well, that’s what I would like right now,” Jenna told her. Then she burst into tears again and reached out and hugged Michelle to her. “I’m sorry,” Jenna wept. “I’m just …”

  “I know, sweetie. I know,” Michelle said and stroked her daughter’s long hair. “I know.”

  They were really falling apart, all of them, Michelle thought as she cleaned up after dinner. Frank had been out all day and had called to say he’d be late. The kids had eaten—not that either of them were eating much. She had had to throw away most of their macaroni, and almost all of the meatloaf she’d served with it. Now there was order and some quiet. No phone calls with Frank screaming obscenities.

  She went upstairs to check on Frankie, who only seemed to find comfort in his bath and his pajamas—at least when they were dry. He was playing in his room, some kind of game with action figures which took place mostly under his bed. His head was pushed into the low dark space there while his little rump in his blue and green flannel pajamas was up in the air. “Bedtime soon,” she said, and he wiggled his butt and kept playing.

  Downstairs, Jenna was sitting in front of the television screen playing one of the nastier Mortal Kombat games. She performed like an automaton, barely blinking at the screen as her character kicked and punched mayhem. Perhaps Michelle shouldn’t worry as much about the hour or two Jenna did this every night. Maybe it was a healthy way to express anger, but what did she know? She trusted a man who had not only betrayed her but his children, a man who had bought their past by making a deal with a devil on the future. And the future was now.

  Jenna hadn’t even looked up. “I think it’s about time to walk Pookie,” Michelle said.

  “Walk him yourself,” Jenna said, and her tone of voice was eerie, like what Frank had used on the phone in Bruzeman’s office. Michelle actually took a step back out of the room. She knew she should say something to Jenna, but she couldn’t. Jenna abruptly got up and stomped up the stairs. Michelle picked up the remote and clicked the TV off. Then she turned and walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. She jumped when she realized Frank was sitting there at the table silent and staring. She would have to talk to him now.

  With the overhead light on, the kitchen gleamed almost painfully white, Frank’s bent head the only blot of darkness. In her cleaning mania, Michelle had gotten rid of every bit of clutter from the counters and windowsills; the starkness made the bottle of Dewars next to the sink and the glass in front of her husband on the table jump out at her like a warning sign. Frank rarely drank anything stronger than a glass of Chianti. Michelle, because of her mother, rarely drank at all. The bottle of Dewars and a couple of bottles of Peppermint Schnapps they’d received as Christmas gifts stood on a shelf over the refrigerator, rarely opened.

  She pulled out the chair beside him, a chair she had scrupulously scrubbed with bleach just a few days ago, and sat down. “Frank,” she said.

  “What?” his voice was flat and dead.

  “I …” She didn’t know how to tell him about the money she’d found. She didn’t know how to tell him that she didn’t believe he was innocent anymore—that she knew he was guilty of something. She didn’t know how to tell him that he’d broken her heart, that he’d ruined his family, that he’d destroyed her trust. She looked at him, her beautiful, dark, good, strong Frank and saw how weak he was. He had taken a risk, a terrible risk, and he had lost.

  But he had taken the risk without telling her. Without her knowledge, though the risk was her risk, too, and one she would never have agreed to.

  “We’re gonna beat this, Michelle,” Frank said, and Michelle looked at him. He’d said it before. She hadn’t always believed him, bu
t most often she had. Now, for the first time, she realized that she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Proof of his guilt was now hidden in the spare tire well of the Lexus. For all she knew, Frank might have more evidence in the house, though she’d gone over every single bit of it again trying to see if she could find it.

  She remembered what Angie had told her about getting the search warrant. Frank had known that there was plenty of evidence against him. He knew, even as she and the children were dragged out of the house, that he had endangered them, that something as dangerous as a ticking bomb was under the floorboards. But as she looked at him, despite her feelings, she couldn’t just accuse him. She simply couldn’t get the words out of her mouth: Frank, I found the money. I know you’re guilty, at least of something. How could you do this to us?

  “I spent the whole goddamn day over at Bruzeman’s. I didn’t see him. Not for a minute. Two associates made me watch a videotape—goddamn it, a videotape—on giving testimony. And then they asked me every question they’ve already asked before, and then they wanted me to watch the goddamn videotape again. I kept asking for Bruzeman and they kept telling me he was taking a deposition or some shit. He was probably on the golf course. He used to play golf with me sometimes on Wednesdays.” Frank shook his head. “They want you down there tomorrow afternoon.” He sighed, picked up the glass of scotch, swallowed a mouthful, and shivered. Frank didn’t like liquor, either.

  “I’m not going to testify, Frank,” Michelle said.

  “What?” Frank looked at her, really looked at her for the first time since she’d come into the kitchen.

  “I’m not going to testify. I can’t.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Frank asked, his voice low. “Michelle, please. I have had a hard fucking day. A hard fucking week. At the end of a hard fucking month. Don’t start with me.”

  Michelle thought of her day, of the children upstairs, of her feelings of panic and despair. But she couldn’t talk to Frank. She also knew she couldn’t testify. “I’m not going to testify, Frank.”