The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  Kyle slips in like a thief, like a thug; he slouches in. He glances around the room, and there’s something in his eyes. Guilt, Jack thinks. The kid looks guilty as hell. He nods toward Kyle, makes a small gesture, a slight rising movement without actually standing.

  “What?” Kyle slumps into the chair across the table. Sunlight brightens the brown of his eyes, picks up the blond highlights in his hair, too long, Jack thinks. No wonder he can’t find a job.

  “Order what you want,” he says. “It’s on me.”

  “Coffee,” Kyle says. “Black.”

  “Get something else,” Jack says, jovial, almost. Phony. “We’ll have two burgers,” he says to the waitress when Kyle shakes his head. “Two orders of fries.” She scribbles on her pad and hurries back behind the counter.

  Before his brother died, Kyle used to say he wanted to be a cop. He wanted to help kids, he said, wanted to stop them from getting shot down in the streets or in some other country, climbing over rocks or driving jeeps across land mines. He’d make parents accountable to something or to someone, so they’d have to be parents, not drunks and certainly not deserters. This is what he once told Margie and what she then told Jack. He wonders what his son aspires to now, what twists and turns his life has taken since his brother’s death, his mother’s relapse, the discovery of Margie’s clammy body on the floor beside the couch. “How’ve you been?” he says, but Kyle doesn’t answer. He follows the waitress with his eyes. “You take the GED test yet?”

  Kyle nods.

  “How was it?”

  He shrugs. “I think I did all right. They’ll let me know when they—”

  Jack can see Kyle’s hands shaking on the water glass. As if he’s read his father’s thoughts, he folds them under the table. He looks caught. Jack thinks again of the black marks around the window in his office, of Dana squirming when he questioned her, the funny nervous way she played with her hair.

  “So why’d you call me?”

  “I know you were in your teacher’s car.”

  “So?” Kyle’s legs are shaking. Even though he tries to keep them hidden under the table, Jack can see. He taps his foot.

  “So.” Jack leans in closer, looks him in the eye. “So she’s dead. And your prints are all over her car.”

  “She gave me a ride,” he says. “She did that a lot. Gave students rides when the class let out late. She dropped me off in town.”

  “So how’d your prints get on her glove compartment? Inside it, for chrissake?”

  Kyle shrugs. He sits up straighter, leaning against the back of his chair, staring into space, as if the answer to Jack’s question is in the air somewhere over his head. “I was looking for a Kleenex,” he says, “so I could blow my nose, Detective.”

  The waitress arrives, putting their plates down among the tangle of silverware and coffee cups, their discarded saucers. She is awkward, setting a thick, white plate on top of a fork, throwing it off center, wobbly. “Anything else?” she says, but she’s looking at Kyle.

  “We’re good,” Jack says, and the waitress keeps her gaze on Kyle for a few seconds before she trots off toward the kitchen.

  “So you’re saying you went through this woman’s glove compartment looking for a Kleenex?”

  “She told me to. I asked her did she have a Kleenex, and she said to look in her effing glove box.”

  “And now she’s dead.”

  Kyle shrugs again, a careless gesture, but his shoulders stay hunched, his foot tap-taps under the table. Jittery. “I know. It’s all over the news—shots of her house, her dog. . . .”

  “Unfortunate timing.” Jack takes a bite of his burger and chews, gazing past his son toward the door.

  “Yeah. I should plan my colds better.”

  “Listen,” Jack says. “This was a murder, Kyle. You’ve got a record, and your prints are all over the victim’s car.”

  Kyle picks up his burger and wolfs it down like a starving man. Jack notes his eyes—just like his mother’s. “Next time I’ll make sure my teacher’s not planning to get murdered when I ask for a Kleenex. How’s that sound, Jack?”

  “Could you not call me that?”

  “That’s who you are.” Kyle reaches for the mustard.

  “Why don’t you try ‘Dad,’ without the sarcasm?”

  “That’s actually not who you are.” Kyle squirts the mustard on his burger and drops the bun back on top.

  “So how’re you feeling now?”

  “Fine,” Kyle says. “Why?”

  “Your cold. Summer colds are a real bitch. Hard to shake, usually.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Sorry, son, but I don’t buy your story. About the Kleenex in the glove compartment. I’m having a little trouble with a teacher telling her student she hardly knows to paw through her glove box looking for a Kleenex she’d probably have in her purse anyway.”

  “That’s what happened,” Kyle says, but he doesn’t meet Jack’s eyes. “How’s Ann doing these days?”

  Jack takes another bite of his burger.

  “ ’Cause Margie’s not so good. Remember Margie? Your practice wife?”

  Jack looks up.

  “She was pretty much passed out the last time I went by the house. But no worries, Jack. She’s got the TV set. She’s got the pictures of the good son draped around. The whole house is a shrine to Joe.”

  “I could drop over there,” Jack says.

  Kyle laughs. It’s an ugly, sound, like a wrong note. “That is just what she needs,” he says. “Jesus.”

  “You don’t know anything about your mother and me, Kyle.”

  “You planning to clear things up for me?”

  Jack looks at his son across the table, at the longish hair, the big hands, the skinny arms, eyes that can’t hide anything—those wide-set brown eyes, the lashes like Margie’s. “Naw,” he says. “Let’s just say I really didn’t want to leave.”

  “So why did you?” For a second, Kyle is the boy on a battered front porch, watching him take off down the road.

  “She said that was the only way she could be a good mother—if I left. ‘I can’t do it with you here,’ she told me.”

  Kyle nods, smirks.

  “I never stopped loving you, though,” Jack says. “I never stopped thinking about you. You or Joey.”

  “I’m having a little trouble with that, though, seeing as you’ve never done anything at all for me. For any of us.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Jack says, and he lifts his hand, catches the waitress’s eye for the check. “And stay close. I’ll need to question you again about your teacher.”

  Outside, on the sidewalk, they look off into the sky, the two of them. Like father, like son, Ann would say, and Jack knows it’s true. Clouds billow up to the west. The air is still and heavy with the threat of rain, and they flounder, voiceless, their shoes crunching on gravel.

  “Need a ride?”

  Kyle shakes his head. “I’m right near here,” he says. “Me and Maryanne.”

  “Your girlfriend?”

  Kyle nods.

  “What’s she like?”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “I’d like to meet her sometime,” Jack says, “if you—”

  Kyle looks down at the sidewalk, kicks at a small stone with the worn-through toe of his shoe. “Thanks for lunch.”

  “Anytime.” Jack fumbles in his pocket for a business card. “Here,” he says. “I know you’ve got me in your cell, but just in case,” and he presses the card into his boy’s big hand, drops three twenties into Kyle’s pocket as he pulls away. “Hey!” he calls out when the two of them are several yards apart on the sidewalk. “Check your pockets.” And when Kyle looks up, puzzled, he says, “Take care, son.” He stands watching Kyle walk away, this man he last knew as a small child who gripped his hand to cross the street, who sang with him as he played the guitar at Christmas—all the carols he no longer knows—the boy who watched him pack his truck and drive away.
There are secrets locked inside his son that he will never know, but the ones about Celia are right there at the surface. They’ll all spill out at some point. Jack only has to wait.

  He calls the crime scene unit, tells them to go back to the Steinhausers’, to take prints from everywhere around Celia’s bed—the headboard, the nightstand, everything. “Put a rush on it,” he tells them. “And send the results directly to me.” If Kyle’s prints show up in the bedroom, Jack promises himself, he’ll turn the case over to Rob and walk away. That’s the line he won’t cross, but then he shakes his head because he isn’t really sure there is a line. It’s killing him, though, hiding the prints from Celia’s car, not saying what he knows about his son. The prosecutor’s office wants an update every couple of days, a high-profile case like this one—and he’s giving them crumbs. He’s your son, he tells himself. You owe him. But Jack has never compromised himself like this before—not on the job. Everything else in his life is shit, but this one part of it he’s been careful to keep pure as the driven snow. Until now.

  CHAPTER 19

  As soon as she gets into the car, Dana notices something on the seat. A scrap of white paper, obvious in a car that for once is as neat as a pin, thanks to the cleaning project she devised to keep herself focused. She’d gathered up all the overdue library books and fished out the notebooks filled with scrawls and lists and stacked them neatly on the floor of the backseat. Pads and pencils are now fitted into a plastic box she purchased at Target for odds and ends. She even ran a cleaning rag across the dash and of course St. Christopher.

  She reaches down to brush the paper off the seat but thinks better of it. This is how it begins, the mishmash of trash and books and overcoats. It begins with a single piece of paper that stands out, like this one, in a clean front seat. She picks it up and sticks it in her purse.

  Something catches her eye just as she’s turning the key in the ignition, her attention already moving to the gas-gauge needle, barely budging from its lying-down position on the E. She sees something—a dab of color—and she looks back at the paper, stuck now to the damp outside of a partly empty bottled water in her bag. She peels it off the plastic and stares at the same tiny writing she saw the day of the brunch.

  She takes her reading glasses out of her purse, moving in small, robotic increments, as if a decisive shift might rouse the author of the note from a nearby hedge or send him springing from the trunk of her car. She stares at the scrap of paper in the bright sunlight. “You will pay for what you did, you crazy, deadly bitch.” Even with the teensy writing, she can read the message easily. This time the note is clearly a threat. The first one . . . well, bad enough—but this one is much more ominous. She feels her brain sparking, emitting bright flashes that fizzle and die, misfiring like a bad engine. She cringes, slumping down in the seat. The steering wheel stares at her, the Toyota logo a lopsided smile as she struggles to focus.

  When she was eight, there was a note inside her desk at school. Nasty. Cruel. “We hate you”—a note left by the class bully or a boy with a crush, someone who didn’t like the way she looked, who thought she talked too loudly or not loudly enough, who didn’t like her mother’s car or that her father had died a sudden, violent death—a bevy of girls, she imagined, with perfect hair and blouses tucked neatly into the Catholic plaid of their skirts. She’d folded the note carefully again and again until it was a tiny thing, a square the size of a pea, nearly invisible, and then she’d slipped it back inside her desk. She never told a soul. It terrified her, though, knowing that someone was there, at the back of the room or passing her in the corridor—someone who hated her. Her present fear is heightened by the resurrection of this hastily buried memory, and for a second, in her panic, she wonders if the author has been with her all along, stalking her far into her adult life.

  The air conditioner spits out puffs of cool air. The radio news is barely audible. The voices scare her. She turns it off, but she can still hear it, a soft, indecipherable hum.

  You will pay.

  She takes off her glasses and sticks the note back in her purse— beneath a flap inside her wallet—and edges her car onto Ashby Lane. There is nowhere she really wants to be, but her own house is the place she least wants to be, now that this person has access to her car and, even more frightening, her house. She drives in circles around the neighborhood, gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles are white. Did someone see her with Celia the day she died? Did someone see her leaving the Steinhausers’ or watch from the clot of trees in her backyard as she stood at the kitchen sink scrubbing her hands before she fell across her couch in a drunken stupor? Or is it something else she’s done, some minor, unintended offense– Christmas lights left up too long or an overlooked potluck invitation? Dana feels a shiver up her spine. You will pay. You will pay. Her fingers tremble on the steering wheel. Her heart flutters and skips. She feels light-headed and faint. Paralyzed with fear.

  She thinks maybe she’ll drive to the police department and hand both notes over to Detective Moss. She even turns around and drives several blocks in his direction before she pulls in to a BP station and stumbles out to pump gas into her now completely empty tank.

  Back in the car, she concentrates on a broken neon sign in the parking lot next door, on the thunderclouds that cover everything in gray, and then she pulls out her cell and calls Peter.

  “Dana?” He sounds annoyed. “Listen, I’m really . . . we’re really slammed in here today. I—”

  “Wait,” she says. “This is important. I found another note.”

  “Another what?” She pictures his puffy hand around his phone. “I can’t really hear you.”

  “Well, step outside, then. Go to the john.” Pretend I’m the Tart or a client for five fucking . . . “I really need to talk to you.”

  “Okay,” he says after a few seconds have gone by. “I’m outside. Now I can hear you.”

  “I got another note. Like the one in my book. Like the one the day of the brunch.”

  “In the house?”

  “No. It was on the front seat of my car.”

  He pauses. “It goes without saying, if you locked your car door—”

  “Right. So let’s let it go without saying. Anyway, it was on the front seat of my car when I got in it this morning. That same writing, that weird, teensy—”

  “What time?”

  “What time? What difference does it make what time? I don’t know what time. Ten, maybe.”

  “What’d it say?”

  “‘You will pay for what you did, you crazy, deadly bitch.’”

  “What the hell does that mean? What’d you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Dana says. “I don’t know what I did. Maybe I did something horrible.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . . I don’t know . . . like something really . . .”

  “Look.” Peter’s hand makes little ruffly noises on the phone. “Maybe this is just you, Dana—your Catholic stuff. Your overactive guilt.”

  “Is making me . . . what? Hire someone to write me scary notes?”

  She hears him breathe in deeply. She hears traffic and the sound of smoke drifting in and out of his lungs.

  “I’m trying to come up with a way to put this delicately.”

  “Because you’re always so delicate when it comes to my feelings,” she says.

  “Okay, then,” he says, and he takes another toke. At least it sounds like a toke. Dana wonders if they get high at Glynniss, Hudgens and Catrell on their lunch breaks, if Peter and the Tart sneak off to the boardroom together to light up, if maybe she’s the daughter of one of the senior lawyers.

  “Is she a Glynniss?” Dana says, but Peter’s talking, too, so he doesn’t hear her. “What?” she says.

  “I said maybe you wrote the fucking notes.”

  “Thanks.” Dana pulls the phone away from her ear. “Thanks for the delicacy.”

  “On the note I saw—the one from the brunch—the writing was so
tiny,” he says as she fumbles for the OFF button, “it could have been anybody’s, really. It—”

  Dana sticks her phone inside her bag and stares at the sign with the missing letters, but this time she doesn’t cry. This time she shivers in the soggy summer heat, remembering her own strange, tiny writing on five hundred sheets of paper drifting over Avenue D decades before.

  CHAPTER 20

  The kitten she rescued from the highway bounces down the hall, barely touching the floor. Dana pats the cushion, and the kitten flies across the room, landing on the couch beside her. He hisses when she tries to pet him. He hurtles through the air and out of sight. He is feral. It will take some time, the vet told her, for him to come around, and he might never make a good house pet. It’s ingrained in feral cats, he said, this craziness, this fear. But she’s lucky he’s so young, this one. She was lucky to have spotted him in the rain, tiny as he is. She calls him Spot, partly for this reason and partly for his markings, like black dots across his fur. At the back of his head, a long, thick splash of black looks like a haircut on an actor from the twenties. She reaches out again to pet him. She understands his ambivalence—approach, avoid, approach, avoid—he cleans her hand with a pink sandpaper tongue.

  She leans back, shifting her body so her long legs fall over the arm of the sofa. Maybe she’ll close her eyes for a minute, and maybe, just maybe, she’ll fall asleep. Her lids feel heavy. The kitten dashes across the living room. She smiles as he skitters underneath the sofa and reemerges with something hanging from his mouth. With great effort Dana rouses herself, stumbling toward him as he shoots into the dining room. “C’mere, you,” she says, laughing, falling after him, her body nearly horizontal as he leaps and darts. Something tumbles from his mouth, lands on the carpet.