The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  Dana chokes out a bitter laugh.

  “Which you’ll see if you ever get out of that bed and down the hall where you belong.”

  “Group?”

  “Yep. I’ll even bring you there myself.”

  “Wow,” she says.

  “But only this one time.”

  She doesn’t want to go to group. She barely understands the doctor’s words with all the racket in her head. And then there’s the murder. Celia. Now it’s coalescing. Piece by piece, the thready, floating bits of things, of thoughts and faces, memories and words, are catching on one another’s edges, coming back together, like the big bang working backward, her life an explosion in reverse. There’s so much time to think, lying here on the starchy sheets, the TV in the dayroom a dull and constant droning in the background, like a fly caught in a screen.

  CHAPTER 32

  Jack sticks his phone in his pocket and sits on a bench outside the front doors of the hospital. He tried to question Dana after checking around and finding she was transferred out of Bellevue and back to Paterson, but he was told he’d have to wait. She’s getting settled in, the psych nurse told him when he tried to see her—a tall redhead wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It was only the ID hanging from a ribbon around her neck that separated her from the visitors, the mothers and sisters, the daughters and friends. MARCY, her nameplate said, which Jack thought was interestingly close to “mercy,” and he’d wondered, not for the first time, how people’s names affect their lives—the judge named Truman, the carpenter named Buzz.

  It feels like the ending of things. Even though the day is bright and the sun is blazing through the trees, it feels as if summer’s edged away. The air is still. Ann, Kyle, Margie, Joey—he feels their absence like an ache in his chest.

  “Jack?”

  He turns around. Kyle looks different, but Jack’s not sure how. He’s even shabbier than the day they had lunch. His hair sticks up in tufts, and his clothes look slept in. There’s something else, though. He seems different.

  “Jeez. I thought you were smiling there for a second.”

  “Naw. Must be the sun.” Kyle sits down on the bench. He glances at his watch. “Listen,” he says, “my friend—my girlfriend. . .”

  “Is she all right?” Jack searches his son’s face. “I phoned the hospital early this morning. Did she—”

  Kyle stops him. “Let’s do this first,” he says. “I’d rather just get this interrogation thing over with.”

  “Okay. Your call.” Jack folds his hands. He leans back on the bench, even though he’s dying to know about the baby. He takes a deep breath, forces himself into detective mode. “How’d your lucky charm wind up under Celia Steinhauser’s window?”

  “I don’t know,” Kyle says. “The dog?”

  “What dog?”

  “It was on the news. They showed it on the news. A mutt—small? Brown?”

  “No,” Jack says. “They didn’t. Actually, the dog was missing for a day or two after Celia’s murder.”

  “Oh. She must’ve told me, then.”

  “Would she describe it? I mean, why would she describe it? And why would your charm be there in the first place?”

  Kyle shrugs. “I guess I left it in her car.”

  “Look.” Jack takes out his cell. “I’m trying to help you here. If you don’t want my help, you can talk to someone at the station.” He thumbs through his phone.

  “Okay.” Kyle sighs. “You gonna arrest me, Dad?”

  “Haven’t so far.”

  Kyle looks back at the hospital. He glances straight up at the windows, at one of the windows, it looks like. Jack watches him from behind the black curtain of his glasses.

  “Did you pay?” he says, and Jack nods.

  “I did. Nice place,” he says, and he thinks again of Kyle and Joey when they were little, remembers them swinging on a homemade swing, bright red, their legs pumping them higher and higher, Margie in the doorway, her hands cupped around her mouth. Thinks of the baby. He hands Kyle the key. “I like the tree in front,” he says. “When you were a kid, there was this tree in our front yard. . . .”

  “Yeah,” Kyle says. He smiles. “Yeah. I remember. Thanks,” he says, “for this.” He holds up the key, sticks it inside his wallet.

  “So where’d you get it?”

  “What?” Kyle says. He slips the wallet into the back pocket of his jeans.

  “The wad of bills?”

  Kyle shrugs. He stares at the parking lot, or possibly the street, Jack can’t tell which.

  “I liked Celia,” Kyle says. “I didn’t kill her. She was nice. She was a good teacher.”

  “Go on.”

  “I needed to get out of where I was living. I needed to get Maryanne out of there. That crappy—”

  “Rosie’s Rooms.”

  “Yeah.” Kyle looks at him. “How’d you know?”

  “Your mom,” Jack says. “She mentioned it.”

  “When? I didn’t know you guys were even talking.”

  “We keep in touch. More so lately.”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  “Well, that’s . . .” He doesn’t finish. There’s no point, really. It’s par for the course. That’s Margie, hoarding information, meting it out when it suits her. She still hasn’t called him back. “So you had to get Maryanne out of where you guys were living.”

  “Yeah. I kept trying to find work. Every day I was out looking for something. Maryanne had a job, but she— I knew she wouldn’t be there much longer. She was pregnant, so I knew we might not even be able to afford Rosie’s Rooms. We might be out on the street.”

  Jack bites his tongue.

  “I applied for every job I could find. I tried places that weren’t even advertising, where they didn’t even have signs in the windows, but there was nothing.”

  “So you . . . ?”

  “So nothing. I just kept trying. Maryanne was so sure. ‘You’ll find something,’ she was always telling me. ‘Just keep looking.’ Like that would change anything. I did, though. I kept looking. I was desperate. I was grabbing at straws.”

  Jack doesn’t move. He looks out over the parking lot. He barely breathes. What Kyle says now could end him—both of them, really. How can he put his son away for murder if it comes to that? Then again, how can he not?

  “So this one day,” Kyle says, “it changed everything. I was walking out with Celia. Mrs. S, we called her. It was late. The class was late getting out. ‘Want a ride?’ she says, and I told her sure. She said she’d drop me off in town. She seemed really distracted. She kept looking in her phone. Even when we were in the car—all the time she was driving, she kept looking in her phone. I figured she was hoping to hear from the guy who used to wait for her after class sometimes—that guy you asked me about. He’d stopped coming a few weeks before. At least I hadn’t seen him in the hall.”

  “Did you see him anywhere else?” Jack says. “Ever?”

  “No.” He scratches his head. “Never. Only there.”

  “Anyone else ever out there waiting for her?”

  “Nope. Only that guy, and only him a few times. Four or five times, maybe.”

  “Okay,” Jack says. “So you were in her car.”

  “She stopped at a liquor store. ‘I’ll just be a second,’ she said. ‘It’s been a rough day.’ And she disappeared inside. She was in there a long time. I figured she was checking her cell again before she got in line. Anyway, I was bored. I opened her glove compartment. Not for any reason, really. I was just . . . curious, I guess, to see if she had anything interesting, weed or anything. Her registration was in there, and I glanced at it. And then, just as I was closing the glove compartment, I see this withdrawal slip for five thousand dollars. No money, just the slip, but it was dated that day. That morning. Nine fifty-six.” He stops. He looks up at the windows and then back at the door, at the parking lot, everywhere but at Jack.

  “Go on.”

  “I had to get Maryanne out of that dump. O
ut of Rosie’s. It wasn’t safe. It wasn’t a safe place. I kept thinking about the car registration. I kept seeing Mrs. S’s address in my head. The next time I closed my eyes, it was all there, like it was printed on my eyelids.”

  Jack doesn’t move.

  “I decided to rip her off,” Kyle says. “I decided to break into her house and take her money if it was still there. Not all of it—just enough to get us out of Rosie’s. I’d pay her back. I would’ve paid her back. It was all I could think to do. I was desperate.”

  Then why the hell didn’t you call me? Jack wants to say. Or move in with your mother? He stares at his hands as Kyle lights a cigarette.

  “I walked up there from the bus. When I got close to her house, I put on a pair of gloves I bought at the drugstore. I was sure Mrs. S would be in class, but her car was still in the driveway. I figured she was running late. I decided to wait and look around her house for the money when she left. I knew she wouldn’t carry it with her. She’d hide it somewhere inside, in a book, under her mattress, somewhere simple.”

  He stops. He doesn’t look at Jack; he looks back toward the hospital. “I snuck up near the side of the house to see about the window. It was fairly low. It wasn’t locked. I knew it would be easy to climb through. I didn’t see Mrs. S, though. I thought it was weird she was still there. She wasn’t ever late for class. Not on the nights I went anyway. I just stood there for a couple minutes, trying to decide what to do.”

  “What about the dog?” Jack says. He bites his lips.

  “It was inside. In the house. It was barking like crazy, but not at me. There was something else going on that I couldn’t see. I crouched down in the hedges between their yard and their next-door neighbors’ to wait for her to leave. There was something wrong, though.

  “I heard Mrs. S yell something from the back of the house—from the kitchen, I guess—and then a second later she screamed, ‘What are you—’ And then there’s this racket, a crash, and the dog’s still barking like crazy, and I move backward into the yard next door and I hide. Fuck, I’m thinking. All I want to do at that point is get out of there, and I wait for two, three minutes, maybe.”

  “What time was this?”

  Kyle shrugs. “I don’t know. I was so . . . It was way after seven, though. I know that. Her class starts—started—at seven, and I’d timed it so she’d . . . Anyway, the next thing I know, the front door opens, real slow, real quiet, and I see somebody come out of the house and take off. A second later I see the dog shoot out and run down the street.”

  “Was it a man or a woman you saw leave?” Jack says.

  Kyle shrugs. “It was really foggy, hazy, plus it was starting to get dark. Plus, whoever it was wore a hoodie.”

  “Damn.” Jack sits back on the bench. “Height? Build?”

  “Hard to say.” Kyle closes his eyes. “I’m not sure about either the height or the build. Medium, maybe. Whoever it was was bent over, huddled up, so I couldn’t really tell. Dark gray hoodie, sneakers, I think.”

  “Where’d he—she?—go?”

  “There was another little street across from Mrs. S’s—a side street or something. Whoever it was went down there.”

  “They get in a car?”

  “Yeah. I think I might’ve heard a car starting up. I can’t remember. It was all so . . .” Kyle shakes his head. He looks away from the windows and stares at his sneakers, shabby and worn through at the toes. “I waited,” he says, and Jack moves closer to hear him. “I made sure they were gone, and I went in through the window. She was lying there.” Kyle stops, he chokes. “Mrs. S. She was just lying there near the door. There was blood underneath her, pooled up under her head.”

  “So what’d you— Did you try to save her? Yell for help? Do anything at all?”

  Kyle shakes his head. Tears trickle down his cheeks. “I got on my hands and knees, to help her—to check her pulse, shake her, to do something—and then this car pulled up in the driveway. Her husband, maybe. I saw this vase lying beside her head. She was just . . . God, she was . . .”

  “Then what?”

  “Her purse was there, opened up on the floor, like whoever bashed her head in was looking for something. The money, I was thinking—somebody robbed her. It was there, though. In a bank envelope. Right in plain sight. I grabbed it. I didn’t even think. I stuck it in my pocket, and I got the hell out.”

  “Out the window?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You still had on the gloves?”

  Kyle nods.

  “Anything else you remember?”

  Kyle shakes his head. “No.”

  They don’t speak for a few minutes. They look off in different directions, avoid each other. Finally Jack clears his throat. “Look, Kyle.” He’d bought these super-dark glasses to block the sun, to block out the world sometimes, but right now he’s doubly glad they’re as dark as they are. It’s all there, Jack has always thought—it’s all right there in the eyes, what you’re thinking, and what he’s thinking now is that even if his son is telling the truth, he’ll have one hell of a time selling it.

  “Wait!”

  Jack looks up. “What?”

  “Lavender,” Kyle says. “It smelled like lavender.”

  “What did?”

  “The living room. Around the body. It smelled like this lavender body oil that Maryanne wears. And alcohol. Rubbing alcohol.”

  “That makes sense,” Jack says. “Alcohol erases fingerprints.” Dana mentioned an odor, too, during her first interview. He also remembers seeing a pack of antiseptic wipes on her coffee table when he returned the cat. Lavender fucking wipes.

  “So am I under arrest?” Kyle fiddles with his ring, the high-school ring that Jack gave Margie the money to buy the boy when he was starting his senior year, before Joey died, before their lives were turned upside down and graduating from high school was no longer a priority.

  “Where’s the money?” Jack wants to believe him. Even more, he wants to think he’d believe him even if Kyle weren’t his son. He wants to believe his story’s almost plausible. “Was that what I just handed over to . . . ?”

  Kyle hesitates, and then he reaches into his pocket, pulls out his wallet. “Here’s what’s left,” he says. “But yeah. The rest of it went for the apartment.” He hands Jack a wad of bills. “I wonder what Mrs. S was gonna do with all this money.”

  Jack shakes his head. “So how about your lucky charm?”

  “I guess it fell out while I was climbing in the window. He reaches back inside his pocket. He pulls out the elephant and sets it on the bench between them. “Sorry,” he says, “but I needed it.”

  “How’d you . . . ?”

  “I grabbed it off the table that day in the restaurant when I knocked all the stuff over—in all the confusion.

  “You’re good,” Jack says, “but I wish you weren’t. What’d you need it for?”

  “For Maryanne,” he says. “For luck.”

  “She all right? And the baby? Jeez, kid. Don’t keep me in suspense here. Tell me about the—”

  Kyle smiles. “Maryanne’s fine. She’s great. She and our son. They’re both—” He stands up. “You’re a grandpa,” he says, and Jack gets to his feet. He starts to shake Kyle’s hand, but he hugs him instead, feels a smile spreading across his face, feels the bones of his son’s ribs. After a minute he loosens his grip, but he doesn’t let go all the way. He wants to hold on, to expunge all those years he wasn’t there for either of his boys. He wants to keep Kyle safe, make sure he doesn’t go to jail, make sure he hasn’t just produced another fatherless child, continued a tradition Jack started over twenty years before.

  “Are you bringing me in?” Kyle says. He takes a couple steps toward the hospital, and Jack gives him a long look, shakes his head.

  “Call me, though, if you think of anything else. Anything. And don’t go far.” And Kyle smiles again, says he’s not likely to do that, not now that he has a baby, then takes off running toward the glass doors.<
br />
  “Hey!” Jack yells across the widening distance. “Congratulations, Kyle!”

  “You, too!” Kyle calls, running. His sneakers fly over the grass.

  “When do I get to meet him?” Jack calls through his cupped hands, but Kyle just keeps running. He doesn’t even turn around. He shoots his arm out in a little wave behind him.

  Jack might be crazy. He might be so blinded by this paternal gush that he can’t think straight, but he believes his son. He’ll add in what’s missing of Celia’s money, make Kyle pay him back over time. He’ll tell Ronald it turned up, that it was hidden somewhere—behind a mirror in one of the bedrooms or stuck in the back of a picture frame.

  The sun is high in the sky. Somewhere on the OB ward, his grandson lies swaddled in a blue blanket while Margie blows kisses toward the hard plastic of a nursery bassinet. Somewhere in another place, through a maze of hallways, Dana gathers all the strength she can to open her eyes and look around, taking in the slick white blandness of her temporary world, while outside on a prickly concrete bench, the new addition to a small square of stones and spindly grass, Jack sits staring into space, oblivious to the tears collecting at the corners of his eyes. He mumbles a quick thank-you to God, to the universe, to Maryanne and Kyle, promises them all he’ll raise the child himself before he’ll let him feel alone.

  CHAPTER 33

  Until today Dana’s had no visitors—only Jamie schlepping down from Boston the night she arrived here. She asked them not to let Peter past the desk in this new place where he’s insisted she come, making arrangements for her transfer as soon as she was stabilized.

  “Please,” she’d begged a nurse on the crowded ward that first morning when they told her she was leaving. “I’d rather be here at Bellevue. I’d rather be in the city. I’m a student,” she’d told her, “at NYU, so it’s so much easier if I stay here. And my boyfriend—it’s only here he can get in. It’s only when I’m here I get to see him.”

  The nurse had smiled and patted Dana’s hand, placating, patronizing. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Your husband wants you closer to home.”