The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  One night Peter found her curled up in fetal position on the floor in the baby’s room in the dark, her eyes riveted on the monitor beside the crib, her hair uncombed, her body smelling of sweat and fear. He called a neighbor from downstairs to baby-sit, trundled his young wife, frail and vacant-eyed, to the hospital a short cab ride away, where an intern told them that hormone fluctuations had most likely triggered a manic episode. The intern peered at Dana’s thin form in the tiny cubicle. He gave her shots and pills and sent her home with names of counselors and doctors for therapy and follow-ups and tests, with prescriptions scribbled across small white papers.

  She stayed on lithium for several months, and eventually the sadness went away. The skinny, frantic girl from Bellevue tucked herself back into the past, and Dana soldiered on. But something integral was changed between them; something irretrievable was lost. She sensed that Peter would never love her with quite the abandon he had before her breakdown—that he would never trust her with his child, his house, their lives, exactly as he had before. And if, in the long, black nights that followed, he rolled up on one elbow to kiss her softly on the cheek, it wasn’t passion that propelled him but curiosity or fear, the need to take stock of his unstable wife, to gauge her ability to stand upright inside their wobbly house of cards.

  Peter could have left her many times throughout their marriage, when her energy became a raw and frightening thing, when she drove to the city in the middle of the night and stayed away, leaving him to explain the inexplicable to Jamie—to placate this child who cried for a mother who sparkled and shined and burned out like a shooting star—who came home shrunken, crying in a darkened bedroom. She came back a broken thing, so broken even Jamie couldn’t fix her with his poignant, frantic offerings over the years—the clay handprint from preschool, the crayon drawing of the three of them together, Dana a small stick figure between the two of them, a cheerful sun shining down from the corner of the page.

  It was Peter, always Peter, who took her to the doctor and drove her home again with a set of new prescriptions tucked inside her bag. It was Peter waiting, watching, times when the days came and went, screeching like an accordion folding shut and opening, in-out, in-out, scraping by, until she was herself again. She has always been thankful to him for this, for these sacrifices he’s made. She will always feel a tiny bit of love for him because of them. Even now, with his duplicity hanging like a drape between them.

  She sighs, standing up without using her hands or arms to get out of the chair. In the kitchen the phone rings, and she moves toward the sound, stiff, like Jamie’s toy soldiers lying somewhere at the back of his closet. “Hello?” She presses the phone tight against her ear, turning her back to the living room with its raucous football game. “Did you run into rain,” she says, “going back? Did you find the cookies?”

  By the time Dana hangs up, Peter’s fallen asleep on the sofa and the eleven-o’clock news has replaced the ball game. The lead story is an interview with a ballplayer who’s limping toward the camera with a pulled hamstring. Dana reaches for the remote in Peter’s hand, sticks it on the coffee table, carries his glass back to the kitchen as on TV the first assistant prosecutor is introduced in a follow-up story from Friday. The Steinhauser murder case is top priority, she assures her interviewer; they will leave no stone unturned. She’s working hand in hand with Detective Jack Moss, she says; they’re very close to making an arrest. Dana sets the empty glass in the sink, listening. She grabs the counter; her head buzzes and spins. Her insides lurch painfully, and it crosses her mind that maybe the fish Peter grilled for dinner was bad—maybe Ronald tampered with it somehow when he was bending over her cart. She closes her eyes and counts slowly to ten, trying to regain her balance as on TV the interview ends.

  CHAPTER 7

  First Assistant Prosecutor Lenora White is standing in the office when Jack gets to work, and he’s a good twenty minutes early. She is such an A-type personality. He watches her from the hallway. She really is attractive, especially this morning, silhouetted in the light drifting through the grimy window, and for a minute he forgets how angry he was, watching her on TV. She stands across the room from Jack’s desk, staring out at the gray of the buildings, the ominous clouds, the reluctant sun as it struggles up behind the hustle-bustle of traffic.

  “What can I do for you, Lenora?”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be intrusive, but I told Rob I’d meet him here before work. I’ve got something on the Mancini case.”

  “The missing girl?”

  She nods. “Some family issues have turned up. Just wanted to fill him in.”

  “Coffee?” Jack can hear the machine coming to life across the hall. “It’s bad, but it’s caffeine.”

  “Sure,” she says. “Mind if I sit?”

  “Hey.” Jack gestures to a cruddy swivel chair beside his desk. “Make yourself at home.”

  “How’s the homicide coming along?” She takes the coffee cup gingerly from Jack when he comes back, blows on it as he sets down his own cup, dropping several creams and sugars on his desk.

  He shrugs. “It’s coming.”

  “Such a push for us to— They run that damn picture 24/7, the photograph of Ms. Steinhauser—Cynthia, is it?”

  “Celia.”

  “Right. Celia. Anything turn up yet?”

  “Not really. Strange goings-on the night she died. Looks like someone was inside the house. We’ve got some tests being run by forensics, but nothing’s back yet. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  “Put a rush on it?”

  “Done,” Jack says.

  “Great. This coffee is a little strong,” she says, and she adds another three creamers, stirs it with her index finger. “You guys need a woman’s touch around here.”

  “That an offer?”

  She looks up. “It all depends,” she says. “You’d have to make it worth my while.”

  Jack smiles. Down the hall the outer door thunders back into place. “Must be Rob,” he says.

  “Right on time.” Lenora glances at her watch—simple, Jack notes. Cheap, even, not the glitzy type he’d imagine her wearing. No bling.

  “He’s a good cop,” Jack says, and Lenora takes a sip of muddy coffee.

  “I know he is.” She looks up through a thick batch of lashes. “Rob’s a great guy. Still . . . he doesn’t have the whole James Dean thing going for him.”

  “Who does?” Jack grabs his briefcase, starts to head out. He’ll let Rob have the office for his meeting with Lenora.

  “You do,” she says, and she takes another sip of coffee.

  She’s pushing hard for both these cases to be wrapped up, the homicide and the missing teen, but Jack knows better than to rush things. He’s got to get this right even if it means reining in the assistant prosecutor. It’s a big case, complicated. He flips through his notes. He sent a patrolman back to the Steinhausers’ the morning after the cop thought he saw a light on inside, just in case they missed something in the dark the night before, and he found a few footprints around the back door, maybe new, maybe not so new. The cop photographed them and delivered them to Jack’s office sometime last night. They’re not the best photos. About the only thing he can tell is that they’re small—either a woman’s or a small man’s. Again, the neighbor with the key seems the likely one. Even if what Ronald’s told him about drinking all night at the hotel turns out to be a lie, he’s a fair-size guy and Lon Nguyen is very small, but he didn’t have a key. Almost certainly the footprints belong to Dana Catrell, the neighbor four doors down.

  Rob ran the priors on the suspects, but not much came up. Nothing at all on Dana. There was an old drug arrest on her husband—cocaine possession in college—but the charges were dropped. Lon Nguyen was clean as a whistle. Ronald’s first wife died in a car crash shortly after they were married, but nothing looked suspicious there. The real shocker was Celia herself. She had one arrest when she was a kid in West Virginia for aiding and abetting, the apparent getaway driver
for her boyfriend, who served three years for holding up a gas station with a fake gun. Celia was released after she cooperated with the police. Mother Teresa takes a tumble.

  Jack gets up and pours himself another cup of coffee. The footprints, the lying husband, the Bonnie-and-Clyde teacher bleeding out in her foyer, Ann putt-putting out of his life, and pressure from the prosecutor’s office to wrap things up quick. He can already tell this case will be like herding cats and that Rob will have his hands full tracking down the missing teen. What Lenora said in the TV interview rankles him, but he didn’t mention it when she was in his office. He tells himself he was just about to, but then Rob came in. Jeesh, he thinks. Man fucking up.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dana rolls over, staring at the wall, listening as Peter showers and dresses, sitting up as he turns on the coffeemaker in the kitchen. His voice on the phone is muted. “Noon,” she hears him say, and then the coffeemaker snaps and percolates, and she lies back down until she hears the front door close behind him. His Lexus purrs toward the street.

  She glances outside the living-room window, where clouds are fluffy and white, and then she closes the blinds. The daylight makes her anxious. Nights are bad enough, with her sleeplessness, with her constant prowling and reading, but the brightness of morning is worse. Noon, he’d said on the phone, presumably to the Tart. She’ll drive to Manhattan. She’ll go to Peter’s office at noon—a little earlier, so she can watch him, see who it is he meets, get a look at the Tart in broad daylight.

  At a little after ten, she heads for the city, driving slowly toward the offices of Glynniss, Hudgens and Catrell in the staid brick building only blocks from Central Park. She creeps along the streets, pulling in to a pricey garage and grabbing the receipt.

  It’s nearly noon when she reaches the street and takes a few steps in the direction of Peter’s office. She remembers a tiny park in the midst of a collection of buildings catty-corner to the law firm—two wooden benches in a makeshift garden, a nod to greenery in the smog and clutter of the city. She steps off the curb; there’s something just at the edge of her vision. A car turns onto the street and slows down for a second as if it’s watching her, as if the car itself is alive and trolling for prey—as if it is surprised to see her standing there, unexpected and enticing. It speeds toward her, and for a second she’s paralyzed with fear. She screams. She turns and runs back to the curb, and then she flies backward, her feet barely touching the asphalt. The car speeds past, and Dana disappears behind a clot of parked cars, ducks down beside a large truck. “Five-two, five-two,” she says aloud, struggling to concentrate, to keep at bay the terror threatening to engulf her. A five and a two, all she managed to remember of the numbers on the license plate.

  She unfastens her hair clip, lets her hair fall down across her face. She sticks on her large sunglasses and takes off the shirt she’s thrown on over a tank top. Her arms are sickly pale in the sunny summer day. She crumples her shirt inside her purse and picks her way across the street, on the lookout for a nondescript sedan, a dark car hurtling down the street or squealing around a corner.

  She reaches the small bench at three minutes to twelve and sits, staring across the street toward the door of Glynniss, Hudgens and Catrell. It opens only seconds later, and Peter steps out onto the sidewalk. He walks quickly to the curb, his hand a visor over his eyes as he stares first to the right and then the left, up and down the street as if he’s looking for a taxi, but he makes no move to approach the two or three cabs that lumber by him through the noon traffic. Dana watches from behind her hand, pulling her hair across her face. She watches as a dark sedan pulls to a stop alongside her husband. She watches as Peter rushes to duck inside. The traffic shifts and snarls in the wake of this unwelcome interruption, the stopping of this car in the middle of a midday rush. Dana stands up, walking to the curb at the edge of the small green space, her hair blowing away from her face, leaving her exposed and unprotected as she squints across the street at the back of the sedan, at the five and the two on the license plate.

  She stumbles toward the garage, gulping polluted summer air. She trips over a crack in the sidewalk, glances at the trees strewn in among the buildings, blossoming and green, brighter, newer than the lost Dutch elms. The traffic snarls. Horns honk. The city is a sneer. A smirk. Peter’s city now, no longer hers. Once she’s safely back inside her car, she doesn’t want to move; she feels reluctant to leave the dark garage, afraid she’ll be spotted pulling out to the street, but after what seems an eternity, she starts the car. “Here goes,” she whispers to St. Christopher, lurches up to pay, and speeds toward Paterson, her eyes riveted on the road ahead.

  Once home, she drinks a glass of wine, and for several minutes she sits on her sofa, the blinds closed tight against the day. Finally she picks up the phone to call Peter, even though she isn’t sure how much to tell him of the morning’s strange events. For all she knows, he wants her dead. Or mad. Or are his lame attempts at hiding his affairs making him look guiltier than he actually is?

  “Hello,” she says when he answers. “Are you back?”

  “I’m here at the office,” Peter says. He sounds puzzled. “Why?”

  “I tried to call you around noon,” she lies. “They said you were out.”

  “Who said I was—”

  “So where were you?”

  “At lunch, I guess. With Josh. Josh Reinhardt? He’s one of my clients, wanted to talk about his trial coming up.”

  “Murder?”

  “Tax evasion,” Peter says, and he laughs.

  Dana hangs up. A light blinks in the hallway, on the desk in the foyer—a tiny flicker, a lightning-bug wink, but when she turns her head to look, the defunct lamp is dull and dark beneath its opaque shade, and Dana knows that time is running out. She feels the madness knocking at her brain.

  CHAPTER 9

  The idea of a brunch was at first merely a last-minute attempt to get Jamie home for the second time in a few days, but after giving it some thought, Dana decides it’s a good plan in spite of its iffy origins. She doesn’t think any of the neighbors were particularly close to Celia, but even so it has to be distressing to know that someone on their block was bludgeoned to death in her own living room, a shock to the entire street to lose one of its residents in such a brutal, baffling way. The funeral is on hold for the time being, due to the investigation and presumably the autopsy, and since there’s no memorial service planned as yet, for the neighbors who actually knew Celia, the brunch will serve a dual purpose.

  Dana will have an open house so they can talk about what’s happened, so they can drift from room to room, nibbling on croissants and marmalade, and not feel cornered the way they would at a dining-room table. They’ll speak more openly about their dealings with Celia. They’ll let things slip, so Dana can reconstruct the day her neighbor died, understand the wheres and whos of things, and ultimately put the pieces together.

  She still has Ronald’s number. She has many numbers, written down on scraps of paper lying flat against the bottom of her purse. They belong to people she found comical or brilliant, people she thought she’d like to see again, to meet for coffee in town. In the sparkly period at the onset of her madness, she is magnetic, sensual, alluring. People are drawn to her. Before she drowns inside it, she rides the wave of effervescence; she is gregarious, fun, the clever friend, the unfettered lover, the ideal companion. For a brief, bright clot of time, she shines, making deep but fleeting connections with people she meets in line at the post office or waiting for a tune-up in town. When days later she finds these papers, these cell-phone numbers and e-mail addresses, she often doesn’t even remember the faces connected to them.

  She assumes that not all the invitees will come. Twelve, she figures. Fourteen tops. She isn’t even sure she wants the neighbors chatting with one another, possibly mentioning that Peter’s never home or that they’d seen him sneaking through the back door of the victim’s house. Still, she invites them all; she’ll cast the
deck and let the cards fall as they may.

  She polishes the dustless wooden bottoms of her chairs and thumbs through Brunches for Bunches, a cookbook she discovered on a yard-sale jaunt with Celia several months before. On the way to the grocery store, she stops at a bakery and picks up some croissants and cinnamon rolls and then, on impulse, a few raspberry crullers. She’ll make scrambled eggs, she decides, and maybe fry some bacon. Do her neighbors eat bacon? She opts for veggie sausage and turkey-bacon strips, orange juice and the pastries she’s brought from the bakery. It’s not, after all, about the food. It’s about transparency. Clarity.

  Ronald is the first to arrive. Peter shakes his hand and settles him on the living-room sofa while Dana putters in the kitchen, scrambling eggs and popping croissants into the toaster oven. Orange juice sits ready in a cut-glass pitcher on the dining table beside a large bouquet of daisies.

  “Hi, Ronald!” She stands in the kitchen doorway. Sweat sticks tiny curls of hair to her forehead; the air conditioner drones gamely.

  “Dana,” he says, but he seems reluctant to take his eyes off Peter.

  “So you two meet at last,” she says.

  “What’s that?” Peter cups his hand around his ear as if he hasn’t heard a thing, and the gesture is an unpleasant reminder of their trip from Boston, of his white hand locked around his phone. Around the Tart. Around the lilting voice that titillates and lures.

  “Ronald asked about you the other day at the Root Seller. I thought I told you. Anyway, he’s been very anxious to meet you.”

  “And now it seems you have,” Peter says in a jovial, neighborly voice, but even from the kitchen Dana notices the slight tremor in his hand as he bends to line up the pillows on the sofa.