The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  She turns off the phone and falls back across Ronald’s unmade bed, cluttered with wadded, rumpled bedding. She stares at the ceiling, and it seems to be dropping lower and lower. The walls creep inward, until she’s lying in a tiny space, a claustrophobic cell. There’s nothing to anchor her here or anywhere—there’s nothing to keep her going. If the picture wasn’t real—if the photo of Peter and the Tart did not exist—then likely nothing she remembers from that day is real. Not only are her memories of Celia’s actions on that afternoon a sham, but memories of her own as well. She gets up quickly, before the ceiling covers her, before the walls enfold her, crush her. She wipes her prints off the phone and sticks it back on the bureau. It’s of no use to her now. Or was it ever? She runs her hands through her hair, but she avoids the mirrors that seem to be everywhere in this encroaching room. She glances here and there, on the table near the window, on the cluttered bathroom counter, making sure she hasn’t left traces of her visit, bits of herself she feels are sloughing off at every turn.

  It isn’t even twelve when she presses the button at the elevator, mirrored and smooth in its casing. The pulley squeals, the door opens with a sharp swish, and she steps inside. In the lobby she sets the key card on the counter and looks down at her feet, avoiding the desk clerk coming toward her.

  The doorman is now wearing a hat. He is a clown, Dana decides. He’s wearing makeup and an orange wig. His nose is a balloon. His eyebrows are painted on, his lashes long and loopy. Bozo, she thinks. It must be a special day at the hotel. A special afternoon. For the children, but he seems serious, standing back, holding open the door. He smiles at her. His suit is silly, ruffled, hot, the buttons shiny and bright, catching the sun, throwing it back at her, blinding her with tiny spots of light.

  “Thank you,” she says, and she stares down at her feet. She does not look up. She avoids his loopy eyes, his bulbous lips, his balloon nose. She stares down at the black high-heeled sandals that Celia would have coveted and thinks they’re worth four husbands. Twelve Peters.

  “Have a nice day,” the clown says, Bill W. says, his nameplate blazing up at her as she nods and turns right, fairly running down the sidewalk to the overpriced garage.

  She flips on the air conditioner in the car, aiming the vent up toward her face. The air is warm, but at least it’s moving, blowing wisps of bangs off her forehead. She knows better than to turn on the radio, but the voices come out anyway. Reproaching voices, warning voices. Songs and pieces of songs bounce off the dash and circle the inside of the car, settling in the gaps and lines, the broken places in the roof, settling like paintings, like filmstrips, and she leans back, stares at the colors, floating and merging, and it’s as if she’s sitting in the Sistine Chapel, not an old maroon Toyota littered with bumper stickers. She closes her eyes.

  She’d pinned her hopes on finding the photo in Celia’s phone, this picture Peter told her wasn’t there. “Why are you saying this?” he’d asked her, and now she doesn’t know. She has no answers. All she has is remnants and raveling threads. All she has is pictures on the ceiling of her car, photos she imagined in a phone, contact numbers that don’t go where she’d thought, threatening notes and fancy cars poised to run her down. All she has now, Dana realizes, sitting in the crudely lit space, her eyes focused on the movie playing against the cracks above the visor, all she has is madness. She turns the key in the ignition. Her hands shake on the steering wheel, and she avoids her face in the rearview mirror, the face of a woman who is not what she appears to be. Loneliness engulfs her, smothers her.

  She pulls out of the garage and drives slowly toward the highway. There are too many cars as she approaches the bridge, too many reds and blues and headlight eyes—too many bumpers smiling, too many grids, like white, straight teeth. She clutches the steering wheel and keeps her eyes on the road. When she has crossed the bridge, she turns toward the diner, letting the Toyota coast to a stop.

  “I did it,” she says when Glenda comes to take her order. “I killed her.”

  Glenda sighs. “Hang on. Let me get Hank to cover for me. Herbal tea okay?” she calls out, halfway to the counter, and Dana nods.

  “Fine,” she says, but her voice is barely audible.

  “So?” Glenda is back, sliding over the plastic seat across the table with two cups. She pulls an electric cigarette out of some mysterious place in her apron and takes a smokeless little puff.

  “I did what you said,” Dana tells her. “I was proactive.”

  “Good.” Glenda takes another little puff, squints her eyes like there’s smoke.

  “I stalked my own husband. I even went into Manhattan and ransacked Ronald’s room.”

  “Who’s Ronald?” Glenda bends forward slightly.

  “Celia’s husband. The dead woman’s husband. I was looking for a picture in her phone I thought was there. Everything is disappearing.”

  “These things . . .” Glenda says, taking a puff off her electronic cigarette and glancing toward the front of the diner, where a line is forming at the register. “Maybe they’re real and maybe they aren’t. In either case, consider they’re trying to tell you something. What was the picture?”

  “My husband with another woman.”

  “And is he with another woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there you are,” Glenda says, sliding across the seat.

  “Yes. God! Thank you, Glenda. I always feel so much better after I’ve talked to you.”

  “Just remember.” Glenda leans over the table before she bolts toward the register. “You’re okay, Dana. You’ll be okay. You’re not a murderer. Remember that.”

  Dana leaves a wad of bills beside her untouched cup and slips outside, where rain comes down in a lazy drizzle. If Celia’s message was merely that—a message—if it never really was in Peter’s phone, if it was instead her dead neighbor reaching out from the other side . . . You know what to do.

  She’ll call Detective Moss, Dana decides, backing out onto the road. That’s what she knows she should do. She’ll tell him everything—that she might have killed her neighbor in a drunken, manic rage. She’ll confess to trips across the George Washington Bridge at midnight, to dalliances with strange men. She’ll tell him everything and let him decide what should be done. “Let go and let God,” she says, dredging up the line from an Emotions Anonymous meeting she attended a few times years before. “Let go and let Moss.”

  Rain begins in earnest, falling in small, plump drops that splatter on the windshield, comforting and gray, making soothing, soporific sounds. A sign, she thinks, glancing up at St. Christopher. “Thanks,” she says. “Thanks for this at least,” and he nods; he even seems to smile. The rain picks up. The car hits a large puddle, sending water over the windshield, blinding her for a second, and she resolves to tell him everything, this man who looks so like the Poet. But first she’ll get some help, she’ll go see Dr. Sing. She’ll take a pill or two or eight. She’ll slow herself down just a tad so she can stand it when they lock her up, when the small cell closes in on her, suffocating her. She will be the bigger person—bigger than Peter, with his unfindable, unprovable Tart, bigger than Ronald with his rubber ducks and haikus, bigger than all of them. Like Jesus, Dana knows she has to suffer, that she is here to do the unthinkable, to surmount the insurmountable, to save the clowns and the people in spike wedges, the topplers, the sinners. It is she who will rise to the occasion, she who, like the defunct saint who clings steadfastly to her visor, will surrender herself, unnamed and unremembered, for redemption.

  She’s nearly home, passing over the railroad tracks and accelerating through a small industrial section, when she sees a blur in the rain, a tiny white blotch that hops across the road several feet in front of her car. A rabbit, she thinks, but as she gets closer, she sees it’s a kitten, that it’s stopped in a small patch of grass, soaked and frightened—that it stares, not at the Toyota but directly through the driver’s-side window, directly at Dana. It opens its mouth; it’s
saying something. She can see the words trail out into the rain like ribbons, blue and pink and gold, and she wonders if it’s really there—if it’s her mother or Celia trying to tell her something—to impart some wisdom from beyond. She shakes her head, trying to bring herself back, to ground herself inside the car, to collect what paltry remnants she has left of clarity, of sanity, of her mind. Jesus. She brakes too quickly. The car skids to the edge of the road, sliding in mud, and she feels for a fraction of a second as if the car is flying, as if she is flying, suddenly unfettered, unencumbered. Free. Is this what Celia meant in her voice-mail message, that Dana should join her somehow, extricate herself from the sordid mess that her life has recently become? You know what to do.

  CHAPTER 18

  Jack Moss stares at the manila envelope on his desk. He picks it up and runs his thumb and index finger along its edges, tracing the perimeter, stalling. The crime-scene investigators lifted some prints from the front seat of Celia Steinhauser’s SUV that don’t belong to her or her husband. Forensics got a match, and Jack has the name in his hands. The prints were in the front seat—the door handle, the dash, the radio—but more important they were on the glove compartment—inside it, even. Whoever sat in the dead woman’s car was all over it. Recently.

  He’s happy for the phone call that comes in just as he’s begun loosening the glue at the top of the envelope. Something nags at the back of his brain. He sets the envelope down on his desk and picks up the phone. “Moss,” he says, but his voice sounds scratchy. He clears his throat. “Jack Moss.”

  At first there is only silence, and then there’s Ann. “Can you talk?” she says. “Is this a good time?”

  “Not really.” He swivels around in his chair so he can see down the hall. “But it could be worse.”

  “I went back to the house for a few things, but I’ll have to get the rest the next time I—”

  “Whatever you want,” he says. “Whenever you want.” Now that she’s made up her mind, now that she’s actually gone, he doesn’t want to talk about it. Sometimes he doesn’t want to talk to her at all.

  “Jack?”

  He swivels back, drops his head into his hands.

  “Say something.”

  “There’s nothing left to say,” he tells her, and it sounds silly and cliché and not what he wanted to say or meant to say or what he imagined himself saying if Ann ever left him. And he had imagined it. He always half expected her to be gone when he came home at an impossible hour or missed a celebration or countless other marital transgressions he’d committed over the years.

  “I guess that’s why I’m here and you’re there,” Ann says. “Because there never was anything left to say.”

  “That isn’t true. We had something.”

  She sighs. Her voice shakes. He wonders if she’s crying. “I tried to make things work for years.”

  “Not long enough,” Jack says, but even as he says it, he isn’t sure it’s true.

  “How long, Jack? How long is long enough?”

  He drums his fingers on the top of his desk. “I don’t know, Ann. Maybe this is long enough.”

  “I miss you,” she says, and it is unexpected, this raw truth, this ragged voice, his wife baring her soul somewhere on the Upper West Side, where she’s hemorrhaging money into a hotel. He stares out the window across the room. Dark clouds gather off to the east. “Jack? Are you still there?”

  He sighs. “I’m still here.”

  “Right,” she says, and she hangs up.

  Ann was the one pursuing him in the beginning, opening him up to the possibility of starting over only months after he walked away from his first marriage. She found him in a bar one night after his criminal-justice class at Hunter, sloppy drunk and self-pitying. She was sitting next to him, and they’d started talking—she’d started talking. Chitchat. Bar talk, but when she got up to leave, he’d found he didn’t want her to. He followed her outside and convinced her to go with him to a diner up the street.

  They talked a lot in the beginning, about things that seemed so important, so urgent at the time and that now he couldn’t remember if his life depended on it. For weeks they did nothing but talk. They didn’t kiss, they didn’t even touch until the snowy, stormy night they slept together, the two of them swaying, arm in arm up three flights of stairs to Jack’s hole-in-the-wall room above a bakery off Bleecker Street. They made love as the odor of cinnamon drifted up through the floor, the worn and knotholed boards, as the Russian baker made babka for the morning rush. They fell asleep to snow drifting down, soft and thick and pure, to the tinkling of the small bell on the bakery door, to the sun peeking up between the buildings.

  Their marriage was a good one, but it was always fragile. It was a safe harbor for Jack when he finished school and became a cop and, later, a detective, but he knows it was never quite enough for Ann—that she wanted it to go on forever, that intensity, the leaning over scarred wooden tabletops in late-night diners. The sharing. “You threw me over for your job,” she used to tell him, and she’d laugh, but the last few times she said it, she was serious. “Intimacy issues,” she’d said through the window of her little red Honda the night she left him, backing out of the driveway with the clip-on reading light from the bedroom peeping out at him like E.T. “You should really get some help.”

  He picks up the envelope again and turns it over several times. His hands are large; they cover the writing, the “Attention: Detective Jack Moss.” He never meant to leave her on her own the way he did. He loved her. He loves her still, but it’s like an addiction, his connection to his job, to his work. It consumes him.

  “Work is the one thing you can control,” she used to say, and he thinks now maybe she was right. Not that he can control his cases, not that he can stop the murders and carjackings and suicides or in any way affect the decline of humanity, but even Jack has to admit that work is the one constant in his life. No matter how bad things get, there’ll still be a deskful of files and papers and unsolved cases waiting for him when he gets to the precinct. No matter what shape he’s in, no matter what the hour, like a faithful mistress they will always be here.

  There was a match on the prints, someone already in the system. A prior. He pulls out the sheet. Kyle Murphy. Jack stares down at his son’s name, and he’s almost as disappointed that he’s not surprised as he is to see it printed there on the page. He never thought he’d be glad his ex-wife changed the boys’ last names back to Murphy along with hers after their divorce, but, staring at the paper in his hands, he is. Kyle’s shaky past is back to haunt him. It was this possibility that made Jack put himself on the teacher’s homicide from the get-go.

  When Kyle was seventeen, he was picked up on a burglary charge. Jack got a call at the house in the middle of the night. “It’s Margie,” Ann said, handing him the phone, turning over and inching her body away from his. Margie was another problem between them—another stabbing needle in the balloon of their marriage.

  Kyle had been arrested for a robbery several miles from home, even though he never actually went inside. He tripped the lock with a card of some kind and stood watch while his buddies went in and ransacked the house. The next-door neighbor saw the whole thing through her bedroom window and called 911 with her light off and her nose pressed up against the glass. When the cops arrived, they pulled up to the neighbor’s yard without headlights or sirens and walked next door; caught the kids red-handed. Kyle didn’t have a prayer, standing on the porch with the card still in his hand. They nabbed him before he could even holler out a heads-up to his buddies. Jack left the boy in lockup for the night, and in the morning he called in a favor and got Kyle into a program, a youth camp in the country, away from his low-life friends, and it seemed to work. Until now anyway.

  Jack glances at his partner. He watches Rob lean back in his chair, his desk phone against his ear. Jack turns the papers over, shoves them inside the envelope, resealing it as best he can, and then he slides it to the very back of his desk dr
awer. He retrieves his cell from his pocket and scrolls through the call log for his son’s number as he walks down the hall away from Rob.

  Again his call goes straight to voice mail. It’s morning, still early enough to catch Kyle before he leaves to look for work or to go to GED class if he’s still in it, if he hasn’t already taken the test that he could pass even if he’s only glanced at the pages of algebraic equations, the geometric theorems. His son has a photographic mind; he sees whole chunks of books inside his head. “Kyle,” Jack says into the blankness of his cell phone, pressing it tight against his ear. “It’s me again. It’s . . . um, Dad. I need you to call me right away. This will all be out of my hands soon, so get back to me. Now!” He ends the call and walks to his office, drops into his swivel chair, letting it roll away from the desk. He waits. He walks across the room and stares outside, where pigeons spill along the street toward the courthouse like a trail of moldy bread crumbs, where cars are jammed up at a red light. His cell phone rings. “Hello?” he says. “Kyle?”

  “Yeah,” Kyle says. “What do you want?”

  “You need to get down to the station. We’re on Broadway. Brick building around the— On second thought. Not here. I’ll meet you. You got a car?”

  “Nope. I ride the bus like all the other underemployed, under-parented—”

  “Fine.” Jack cuts him off. “How about the diner down on Getty? Twenty minutes. I’ll see you there.” Again he ends the call quickly, without saying good-bye. He feels a sense of urgency; he feels trapped. He walks back to the chair across the room and stares at the black lines along the wall beside the window; they look like marks made by a bird, made by the pigeons fluttering outside the courthouse, by the claws and wings of captured things flapping against the dull, ugly green of the wall.

  He gets to the restaurant before his son and finds a small table near the kitchen. In the noon light, even with the little bit of sunshine coming through the shuttered window, the table seems too bright, the restaurant too public, and Jack regrets suggesting this place. Even Rosie’s Rooms would be a better choice. He stares at the menu. His shoes gleam in the sunlight from outside.