Four Wives

by Wendy Walker

  “Look. It was a rough time up there. We all saw counselors. But the kids are fine now.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear that. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you,” Marie said. Having opened the door with concern for the children, it was time to turn the light on her client.

  Farrell cleared his throat again, this time twice, and with his eyes closed. Still, he held on tight to his composure as tension spread out across the room.

  “It was not easy. Probably the reason our marriage came apart. We thought the move would help, but it all just followed us here.”

  Marie nodded again, looking at her client with compassion. But she was not about to be satisfied with the small tidbit he’d just thrown her.

  “Why did the marriage fall apart?”

  The man shrugged.

  “If I asked your wife why your marriage fell apart, what would she sayr

  “There really hasn’t been much communication since the accident.”

  With a steady tone, Marie glided into the next question. “Tell me about that, if you’re able. About the accident.” Her voice was soft, but firm.

  Farrell didn’t miss a beat. Lifting his palms from the table, he shrugged slightly. And this time, there was not the slightest crack in his armor.

  “Not much to tell. She fell down the stairs when I wasn’t watching.”

  The words came out with a chilling remoteness that Marie could feel in her bones. Before her eyes, she could see the image of a tiny body, twisted and still at the bottom of a staircase, a frantic father rushing to the scene after hearing the fall, the distinctive thud of dead weight against a hard surface. Then the look of panic, despair, anguish, as he rushes to the phone to call for help, knowing all the while that it is too late, that the child who was crawling through the house moments before was now dead.

  Still, when she blinked and looked again, she saw that same father, vacant, distant’as if the event had been completely erased from his soul, remaining as a mere set of facts to be recited as need be. Had she not been a mother herself, she might have accepted those facts and moved on. Had she not become an expert at detecting the signs of emotional shutdown that the guilty employ in the name of self-preservation, she would not have been as worried as she now found herself to be. Farrell was looking straight at her now, waiting for the next question as though they were talking about the size of his shoes. And everything about his demeanor’the calmness in his face, his hands neatly folded in front of him on the table’told her that this moment had been carefully rehearsed.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said. Then she went on to talk about the questions that would be asked at the deposition, the answers that should be given. And when they were done, she escorted Carson Farrell to the door.

  “So what did you think?”

  Standing at her desk, the same navy suit from the day before now slightly wrinkled, Randy Matthews took a moment before answering.

  “That you covered everything. That it’s complicated.”

  Smiling now, she watched him as he waited for her response, his feet firmly on the ground and that same understated confidence lurking behind the facade. She thought of telling him that he was dead wrong, that they hadn’t even scratched the surface with Mr. Farrell. But that would become more than apparent in the coming days.

  “This is not what client interviews usually look like.”

  Randy nodded. “I imagine not.”

  “I usually start with the marriage. Though it’s not in our best interests as lawyers, we have an obligation to make sure the client really wants a divorce, and that the marriage can’t be saved.”

  “How can you tell the difference?”

  Marie smiled inside. He always knew the next question to ask.

  “Marriage isn’t easy. Especially with small children. And, I think, especially in the suburbs.” Marie started to pace as she gave her spiel. “Kids make you tired, they make free time scarce, pit the two parents against each other. It stops being about taking care of your spouse. I try to tell my clients that it’s something every couple goes through.”

  “And the part about the suburbs?”

  “What?” Marie asked, now lost in a train of thought.

  “You said it’s harder in the suburbs.”

  Again, he was right. And, again, he was holding on to her every word.

  “I think couples become alienated. Men work in the outside world. Women tend to the children and the homes. There’s very little that husbands and wives share. They don’t understand each other’s lives and it goes downhill from there.”

  “Huh.” Randy seemed perplexed.

  And Marie had to know why. “What?”

  “I guess I always saw divorce as a result of love that died.”

  “Well, yeah. I mean all those factors play into the love dying, or hiding at least.”

  “So you try to figure out which one it is. Hiding or dead.”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  Randy was standing next to his desk now, his back propped against the wall, arms crossed. He was getting more comfortable in their surroundings, and this was confounding Marie’s ongoing investigation into his psyche.

  “So which is it with the Farrells?”

  Marie shrugged her shoulders. “That’s what we need to find out. And if we can’t, we need to at least help him gain access to the kids.”

  “OK,” he said, smiling with satisfaction. He was enjoying this as much as she was, the search for answers inside the private lives of strangers.

  “OK. Now see if you can get me the police report on the death of Si-mone Farrell.”

  FIFTEEN

  FALLING

  THE PICKUP LINE AT the Hunting Ridge lower school was particularly long, and Baby Will was growing restless in his seat. Love tapped her fingers on the steering wheel to keep herself from screaming. It was more than Will’s crying and Jessica’s whining pleas for Love to make him stop, or the anger at herself for not getting to the school earlier to be first in line. The night had been long, one more sleepless odyssey that had left her exhausted, and the pain in her neck was now running down the right side of her back.

  It was her own damned fault, she knew. No mother in this town would fail so miserably to sleep-train their children. She had the knowledge, but lacked the will, and at four thirty she’d found herself asleep in the rocker with Baby Will wiggling in her arms. Then came the pleas from next door.

  “Mommy …”

  Henry had called out. At five he was still not a steady sleeper, and already showing signs of the lopsided intelligence she’d handed down. He was unusually sensitive, and far too perceptive for a boy his age’waking with disjointed thoughts that occupied his little head along with the big ears and floppy brown hair.

  “Is it time to wake up?” he’d asked, and she’d scrunched herself up beside him to help him back to sleep.

  With the sickness of exhaustion in her gut, she’d managed to muscle through her day. Getting them all dressed, packing up the bags’Henry’s backpack, the diaper bag, Jessica’s swimsuit and towel for her class. She’d loaded them in the car as Baby Will screamed. Driving, screaming, all day. Now the last pickup, then home again. Her head was pounding, and although she could fight the urge, she knew already that she would make the coffee. There was no chance of getting through the nighttime routine without it, even though it was probably getting into the breast milk and stunting Will’s development. Another rule broken. And yet she had sworn to herself again and again that there would be no mistakes. Not this time. Not with her children.

  Sitting in the car now, with the baby crying and her pain growing, she could feel the desperation push to the surface.

  “Mommy!” Jessica was pleading. “Make him stop!”

  “I’m sorry, sweets. I can’t right now. He has to stay in his seat.”

  In a matter of seconds, Jessica began to cry, and Love didn’t blame her. Were she not a mature woman, had she not bee
n socialized over the course of thirty-eight years to ignore every unpleasant human impulse, she would be screaming herself’perhaps even slamming her foot on the accelerator and ramming the car ahead in a fit of insanity.

  In the end, it was too much to bear. Riding a wave of rebellion, Love waited for the Lexus in front of her to move forward, then maneuvered her minivan out of the line’the line that was dictated by school policy and strictly enforced. Only if a parent had good reason could they park in the lot and walk to pick up their child. There simply wasn’t enough room for all the cars, not to mention the mayhem that would result from the mix of cars and pedestrians in the lot. Love understood the reasons. And like everything else in Hunting Ridge, universal conformity was the very thing that kept the community so pleasant.

  Still, the children were crying.

  With her eyes fixed on the road, Love ignored the stares from the other mothers as she drove past car upon car, making her way to the front of the school. She pulled into the adjoining parking lot, and weaved through the lanes. There were spots open, but only in the back three rows.

  “No way,” Love said out loud. She stepped on the gas, drove to the front row, and pulled into a handicapped spot. It was the worst kind of transgression’clearly illegal, unambiguously defiant. But Love didn’t care.

  “Come on, Jessie,” she said, pulling her daughter from her seat. Jessica wiped her eyes, a look of surprise coming across her red face. What is Mommy doing!1Next came Baby Will. Reaching his mother’s hip, he too stopped crying and assessed the situation. With wide, curious eyes, he looked to his mother for an explanation. She was always there to make sense of things. Stairs, toilet, hair dryer. But today she was silent, in some other world where he couldn’t reach her.

  They started to walk, but Jessica refused to move.

  “Carry me,” she said.

  Love stopped and looked down at her pink-clad child, little blond ringlets flying every which way and tears still wet on her cheek. How could she refuse? She was carrying Will. She always carried Will, as Jessica was quick to remind her. From the moment he entered this world he’d been attached to Love like a fifth appendage. And when she tried to remove him, he reacted as anyone would to a person severing their own limb’with utter dismay. In his mind, they were one. It was that simple, and it had been but a matter of time before Jessica wanted a piece of the action. On this afternoon, giving in to her daughter’s pleas’and her own guilt’would prove to be the crucial error. But Love didn’t have it in her to reason with a three-year-old.

  “Here,” she said, bending down to scoop up her little girl. With thirty pounds on her right hip, and sixteen on the left, Love crossed the grass median, then squeezed between two of the SUVs and Mercedes wagons waiting in the line. Stares of disbelief, disapproval, and’most of all’envy, burned a hole in her back as she approached the children lined up by the school’s entrance.

  “I need Henry, please,” Love said to the teacher handling the dismissal. Like much of the school’s staff, the woman was young, just out of college, with an air of self-importance that verged on disrespect. Dressed in a skimpy skirt, matching blouse, and shoes whose shape defied all rules of geometry, she looked Love up and down through eyes that were now squinted. And although she pursed her lips tightly and started to speak, she ultimately held her tongue. It was too unseemly to berate a woman carrying two children in her arms, especially one so disheveled.

  As the girl turned to fetch Henry, Love could feel herself, her life, in the expression left behind. Wrinkled pants’no time to iron. Hair long and unruly, nails unshapely, skin dry. There was a time when things like this had mattered. The house had been let go as well. The screens on the porch were ripped, the front step loose, jam and syrup crusted on the refrigerator shelves. It wasn’t just the little things either’the whole place screamed of chaos. Toys were sprawled out in every room’cars and trucks and hot-wheel contraptions, play kitchens, and big, unsightly plastic dollhouses, and of course, Legos (Henry’s obsession) in various stages of construction. When did it become like her to be this way? Or was it? There just never seemed to be time for herself or the house. She was in a state of perpetual motion, and her father’s letter had sent her into warp speed’on the run from what she knew was coming.

  Love smiled when she saw Henry, though every muscle in her back was starting to tighten.

  “Hey, big guy! How was school?”

  Henry looked surprised. This was not how things were supposed to be, and even at five, he could sense that his mother had done something wrong.

  “Mommy, you’re supposed to wait in the line.”

  “I know. But sometimes things happen and we have to do things a little differently. It makes life interesting!”

  Henry wasn’t buying it. He knew his mother too well not to see through the sugar coating. With a look of embarrassment on his face, he followed her through the line of cars, acutely aware of the mean looks from the strangers that were now upon him. Deflated, he hung his head and walked close to the rest of his family, hoping he would blend in and escape unnoticed.

  As he approached the median, there was a scream, a cry of pain that was both peculiar and haunting. It was not the sound Baby Will made when his mother put him down, or his sister when she didn’t get her way. This was the cry of a grown-up, and Henry thought it was the worst thing he’d ever heard. Looking up, he saw something equally disturbing. On the small patch of grass, tangled in a heap of arms, legs, and heads, were his mother, sister, and baby brother.

  “Mommy!” Henry yelled, his feet glued to the earth.

  Looking back, Love would remember the feeling distinctly. Her back had simply let go. When she took the step up to cross the median, that was how it felt’a complete collapse of her body and with it her hold on the children.

  She tried to sit up, locate each child, make sure they were all right. But nothing in her was working. A moment later, she heard the crying’first Will, then Jessica, and for the first time in her life as a mother, she was crying herself with relief at the high-pitched wails.

  “I’m OK, Henry,” she said, trying to reassure him. There was no doubt in her mind that her oldest and most sensitive child would also be the most unsettled. “I just fell’I’m really OK. Can you come and get the baby for mer

  Henry stood still, fear and confusion mixed together on his face as the tears began to fall.

  “You can do it. Can you see him here?”

  Love couldn’t move her head, but she could hear the baby just beyond her. “Can you see him?”

  Henry nodded, but didn’t move. In a matter of seconds, a circle of women had formed around them. Jessica was suddenly before her in the arms of a familiar stranger, then Baby Will with another. Voices of concern mingled in a soft hush, and Love knew she should answer, tell them what she needed. But the pain was too intense. Her head became light, full of air, and her vision began to blur.

  Then it all went black.

  SIXTEEN

  THE RESCUE

  “LOVEY, CAN YOU HEAR me?”

  When she came to several minutes later, the flurry of confusion had given way to a somber, alarming concern. Still laid out flat on the moist grass, Love listened for her children’s cries, but heard only muffled chatter and a soft familiar voice close to her ear.

  “Lovey?”

  It was Gayle, kneeling down next to her. Dressed in one of her expensive pants suits, her hair perfectly styled into place and smelling of fine cosmetics, Love’s friend had swooped in and taken charge. She’d been stuck at the back end of the car line when Love fell, but like a row of dominoes, the women had left their vehicles for a firsthand viewing of the event, and Gayle had done the same. Walking up the hill from the road to the school parking lot, she’d seen Henry standing alone, then heard the distinctive cry of the baby. She’d quickened her pace and reached the circle of women standing around. In a tone that was at the same time polite and commanding, Gayle had broken through the ranks and issued the or
ders.

  “Anne, take Henry to Love’s car. Joanna’bring Jessica, then come back for the baby. One of you stay with them.”

  Gayle knew these women. She knew their names and faces, the names and faces of their children, where they lived. She was a fixture in the community, present at every fundraiser from the YMCA to the library to the school book fair. And despite her gentle disposition, she had a strength within her that showed its face at times like this one’when someone other than herself was in need of help.

  The women had listened. One after another, the tasks were carried out until there was nothing left to do but wait for the paramedics to arrive.

  “The kids … ?” Love asked, but Gayle put her hand to Love’s lips.

  “They’re in the car. Everyone’s OK. Not a scrape. You need to lie still now.”

  Feeling her friend’s soft hand clasped around her own, Love returned her head to the ground and tried to relax. The pain had become indescribable. Running from the base of her skull, down her right side all the way to the back of her knee, the piercing ache was more than she could bear.

  “I hear them!” one of the women said. Then the siren grew louder.

  Gayle squeezed Love’s hand before letting go. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”

  Standing over her now, waiting for the paramedics, Gayle was completely unfazed. Nothing mattered to her’not the curious stares of her peers, or the muddy stains on the knees of her silk pants that would never come clean. The concern for her friend was selfless, needing no praise or recognition, and this was precisely what held most people an arm’s length away. Despite the way she lived, Gayle’s heart was as pure as they came. No one wanted to look in that mirror.

  From the ground where she lay, Love watched two young men in blue uniforms rush to her side with a gurney. Her head was placed in a brace, and a board slid under her. Within a matter of minutes, she was hoisted on the gurney and rolled to the ambulance, her friend at her side every step of the way.