The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  “I haven’t got a husband. It’s my mother,” Dana told her. The nurse hadn’t answered; she’d only bestowed a final round of hand patting and taken off down the hall.

  Dana understands now it was Peter who had her transferred. She remembers her mother’s death; she knows she isn’t studying at NYU. She knows that the Poet is no longer in her life, at Bellevue or anywhere else. She understands that she imagined his visit.

  “Dana?”

  Several patients sit near her in the open area, watching a television set that blares in a corner. Three tables surrounded by straight-backed chairs are scattered here and there around the room, and three large couches skirt its edges. She sits at one of the tables, staring at the TV on the wall. She looks up at her visitor. “Detective Moss?”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Of course,” she says.

  “How are you?”

  “Better,” she says. Her tongue is thick. It comes out “buttr.” She takes a gulp of bottled water.

  “I brought you something.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the St. Christopher medal from her visor. “I brought you a chain, too,” he says. “I left it at the nurses’ station.”

  “Thanks,” she says again. “Afraid I might strangle myself with St. Christopher?”

  Jack looks down at his shoes. Well, it’s . . . you know . . . the rules.”

  She smiles. She looks at him. “Were you here before?”

  “No,” he says. “Not here.”

  “Bellevue?”

  He nods.

  She studies her fingers. She looks at his face. For a minute or two, she doesn’t say anything. “It was you,” she whispers.

  “Yes. You seemed to think— I got the feeling anyway that you thought I was someone else.”

  “Yes,” she says. “You look like him.”

  “Him?”

  “Someone I used to know. A poet I used to know.”

  Jack nods. “Do you mind if I sit down? Ask you some questions?”

  “No,” she says. “Not at all. I remember I was supposed to come to your office—”

  “Right.” Jack pulls out the straight-backed chair across from hers. It makes a scraping sound against the shiny linoleum. “Your husband,” Jack says, and he sees Dana tense up. “Did you know before the day of her murder that he was involved with Celia?”

  She sighs. “No. Had no idea.”

  “But you know now.”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you begin to think so?”

  “The day she died.”

  “Did she tell you this?”

  “Well,” Dana says, “not really. But she was so . . . eager—to out him.”

  “With his secretary, you mean?”

  “Yes. The Tart, I called her. I didn’t know her name—a moot point now, of course.”

  “Not really.” He leans toward her. “You’re wrong about the picture. Ronald was in my office the day after . . . the day you came here. He said he’d found another phone—that his wife had a second phone or something and he found it under the mat in his car.”

  Dana yawns. “So?”

  “So he told me the photo you’d asked him about the other night was actually in that phone—this second phone.”

  “He’s lying,” she says. “He’s just trying to—”

  “I know he’s lying. He’s a really bad liar. But the thing is, at some point he did see the picture. He described it in detail. It sounded like the one you saw. In fact, he asked me to tell you. Thought it might help.”

  “It would have.” Dana’s eyes drift up to the TV. “For a while there, I thought if I could find that photo— I thought if I could only know it was real, I’d be all right.” She smiles. “God. The things I did to find that stupid cell phone.”

  She is riveted to the TV set, the clapping hands of the judges. Jack clears his throat, rattles some papers. “Dana?”

  She nods, but her attention is across the room on the nonsense on TV.

  “If you thought Celia was involved with your husband, how did that make you feel?”

  “Angry,” she says. With some reluctance she turns away from the TV and looks at Jack. “Furious.” And then he’s the one who looks away; he has to. There’s something so unexpected there behind her eyes, something so intense it could consume her, consume everything around her. For a moment it’s as if the funny, fragile-seeming Dana’s been replaced by a stranger, an angry, chilling entity he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know.

  Jack clicks his pen point in and out a couple times, looks down at his notes. “When I saw you at Bellevue,” he says, “you told me you’d done something awful. At the time I figured it was just the drugs they’d given you or—”

  “A delusion, Detective?” Her voice is cold. Clearer suddenly, but icy. Hard as glass.

  He shrugs. “You tell me.”

  She turns her eyes back to the wall, to the panel, to a young man singing on a stage. She takes a breath and lets it out slowly. She fiddles with her robe. On TV a young black man croons into a microphone.

  “You were angry.”

  “Yeah. She’d just shown me a photo of my husband with another woman. Yeah. I was pissed.”

  “At her or the woman?”

  “At the Tart, I guess. Mostly.”

  “So you’re saying this was a shoot-the-messenger sort of thing?”

  “I guess I’m saying— Look, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m really tired. Do you mind if we do this some other time?” Dana’s eyes drift back to the television. Her hands drift to her lap.

  “Yes.” Jack reaches over and taps her on the arm. “I do mind, Dana. This is important.”

  She sighs. “What? What do you want?”

  “Were you angry at Celia or at the Tart?”

  “The Tart. At first. But I also knew. Thought. Later . . . I knew.” Her eyelids droop. She is no longer watching TV. Her body slumps forward slightly.

  “Dana. What did you know later?”

  Her eyebrows knot together. Her eyelids droop again. On TV the panelists hold up cardboard squares with nines and eights. The crowd applauds. A nurse heads toward them, across the shiny floor, her sneakers squeaking on the linoleum.

  “Dana?”

  “Everything’s sort of mudd— Why would Celia care so much that Peter was with the Tart? I mean, why would she be following him around, snapping pictures of him in her phone unless they were . . . No. I knew they were lovers, or whatever. I knew they were fucking.” The last word comes out louder, angry, reverberating in the sudden quiet of the dayroom. The nurse stops at their table.

  “Time to go,” she says. “Visiting hours are over.”

  “Oh,” Dana says, pushing herself away from the straight-backed chair.

  “What about the notes?” Jack stands up with her. “When you’re out, I’d like to look at both of them.”

  “They’re here,” she says. “I have them here.” Another nurse squeaks toward them in her rubber-soled shoes.

  Dana shrugs. “Maybe Peter’s right. Maybe I wrote them. I’m not sure. One was in my house, and one was in my car.”

  “Was it your handwriting?”

  “No,” she says, “not really. But then I wasn’t doing anything the way I usually do—not for the past few weeks. And my handwriting changed once before, years ago, when I . . . in college when I . . .”

  “So you have them here in the hospital?”

  “Yes,” she says. “They’re in my purse, but they took my stuff.” With some difficulty she gets to her feet, wobbling for a few seconds. “Thanks,” she says, and her voice is wobbly, too, but softer than before. Dana again and not that strange, unnerving— “Thanks for St. Christopher.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Jack waits at the locked door to be let out, to head back to his car in the parking lot, to leave this place of cheery walls and frightened, medicated faces. When he turns around, the nurse is already heading toward a few stragglers still visiting, to a brother
or a lover or a friend still sitting on a hopeful couch with flower-printed cushions, staring up at panelists waiting to judge another singer.

  He turns to look back, but Dana doesn’t reappear. He has her there in his head, that image of her, the sad, slow way she moved down the hall away from him, away from the dayroom with its large windows, its squares of thinning sunlight forming patches on the floor and glancing off the sides of things—tables and chairs and sofas. He has that image of her seared across his brain. But there’s the other image, too, the rage he saw behind her eyes. He wonders where Peter is. With his other girlfriend, the one that’s still alive? The Tart, as Dana called her? Does he come here at all now that he’s moved his wife away from the city, away from where she begged Jack that first night to let her stay? Bastard, he thinks, and as if his thoughts have conjured Peter from thin air, the man is suddenly in front of him, so close that Jack nearly knocks him down as he plows through the outside door. “Oh,” he says. “Damn. Sorry. Didn’t see you there.”

  Peter brushes off his jacket. “What was that, Detective?”

  “Nothing. I’ve just been to see your wife.”

  Peter nods. “And how is she?”

  “I wouldn’t really know about all that,” Jack says.

  “Was she able to help you in your pursuit of— What exactly is it you’re pursuing now, Detective Moss? Still working on the Steinhauser death?”

  “It’s a murder case,” he says. “Your wife and I had an appointment, but obviously she wasn’t able to make it down to my office.”

  “I see.” Peter elbows past. “Don’t question Dana again without a lawyer.”

  “Would that be you, Catrell?”

  Peter glances at the door. “No, Detective. It would not. In the first place, I’m not a criminal lawyer, I’m a tax attorney, and anyway, I’m not certain I could—”

  “Could what?”

  Peter shrugs. He glances at Jack and looks him in the eye for a second, maybe two. “Help her,” he says. “I’m not convinced—” He stops, clears his throat. “I’m a tax attorney,” he says again. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

  When Jack reaches his car, his phone beeps on the front seat, and he picks it up. THREE NEW MESSAGES. The first is Ann. She’s coming by, she says, in the morning. There are a few more odds and ends she’s left at the house, plus there are several things they need to discuss—finances, her new place—practical things. It’s not an especially personal message, but at least it’s her voice. He listens to it several times before he saves it.

  The next one is the prosecutor’s office. Lenora. Professional again. Cool as a cucumber.

  “If you have a minute,” she says, “we need to talk about your case. I can see you anytime tomorrow as long as it’s before noon or after two. Let me know.” She leaves a number—her cell phone, he imagines. It’s different from the office number he already has.

  And then there’s a message from Kyle. The baby’s sick, he says. A fever. Maryanne was ill when she delivered, and they’re keeping him in NICU a few more days for observation. “I’m right here,” Kyle says at the end of the message, his voice barely more than a whisper. “I’m not going anywhere, but I haven’t told Maryanne anything. Or Margie. Please, Jack,” he says, and his voice sounds strange. Worried. “I really need to be with Maryanne. At least until we know the baby’s all right. . . .” The message trails off. Kyle. Jesus.

  He slides his seat back and stares out the windshield at the sky. Soon it will be dark. Soon a nurse will squeak across the dayroom floor and take her place behind a window where she’ll administer the meds. Soon Dana will stand in line, stretch out her palm for pills—two, three pills. Soon her eyes will glaze over and she’ll shuffle back to her room and lie across her bed, St. Christopher on the table next to her, the secrets of the night she tried to fly locked up inside her head. Something about Dana touches him, but things aren’t looking good for her as far as the case goes. He calls down to the precinct to get a warrant started for the notes in her bag. No doubt Lenora wants an update.

  CHAPTER 35

  Dana can see Peter through the glass. She sees him as she eats her dinner, some kind of poached fish she can’t identify, bland and watery, a soggy sprout of broccoli, a slice of buttered toast. She sips her water, setting the plate back on the tray to be picked up later. They’ve let her eat in her room because of Peter’s being there to visit. He stands, shifting from one foot to the other in the small space on the other side of the glass.

  She sighs. She runs a brush through the tangles in her hair and walks into the bathroom, where she splashes water from the tap across her face. It’s the first time she’s seen her husband since her transfer here, since the night she was picked up, since he came to see her in the cubicle at Bellevue sometime before dawn. She bends over to put on the new slippers he left at the nurses’ station along with several other items in her overnight bag. Small fake jewels glitter up from the yarn toes. She sighs again and walks out to the lobby to perch on the flowered couch across from the TV.

  When Peter sits down beside her, Dana feels a slight shifting of things, a subtle upheaval of her insides. She wants to leave, to run away. She’s learned here in this place to listen to her body, to her heart. These last days in D Ward, she’s been learning to stop, to examine and absorb what makes her feel this way or that before it overwhelms her, before she reacts. She works on these things now, in group, in sessions with Dr. Ghea, these coping mechanisms.

  She is one of three women in group therapy; the other four members are men. Sometimes Dr. Ghea is the facilitator, but usually it’s Dr. Tim. One of the other women—Tina, she calls herself, although Dana wonders if she’s made up the name, if she has another, truer, less flamboyant name she uses in the outside world—is a suicide like Dana. As they say Dana is, even though she’s tried to tell them countless times how wrong they are, how different she is from them, that she had only meant to fly. “This is what I would have done if I’d wanted to die,” she said one afternoon in group. She’d flung her wrist in the air, shown them her scar, let them gaze at the white, puckered line between her veins.

  “Why?” one of the men said. Riley, she thinks it was. “Obviously it didn’t work too well the first time.”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t have an answer. She lowered her arm and thought about what he said and wondered if “flying” might not be another word for “death.”

  The walls of the group therapy room are filled with paintings that remind her in some way of Spot—wild, unfettered paintings. Swirling. Colorful. Many of them were done by patients on D Ward, some while they were locked up here, when they stood drugged and weaving at their easels, painting from memory or from photographs brought in by family members or friends or lovers. Painting what they saw around them, the cacophony of sights and sounds, the slippery blur of things, the colors far too elaborate, too daunting, too dazzling to be real, or painting what they saw through the window—the barren bleak of winter, the dead, denuded trees, the brown wisps of grass. She’s begun to paint in art-therapy class. Her paintings aren’t the thick, pulsating, van Gogh works she’d planned to do; they’re watery and small, but she likes them.

  She sees herself in Tina. She hears her thoughts in Tina’s words, and in Melinda’s as well—heavy, sad Melinda with her stockings pulled up past her knees, her long sleeves covering her arms but not erasing the random, unexpected glimpse of cigarette burns and pencil stabs, of toenail-scissor cuts in the soft white skin of her thigh.

  And every once in a great while, Dana sees herself in one of the four men—so different from one another, so vastly different from her, and yet in some ways they are all the same, dancing on the precipice, the face in Munch’s Scream, sharing the bright and naked thing that burns like a meteor inside them, that makes them want to sing, or die or, Dana finally understands, to fly.

  “Hello, Peter.” She doesn’t look away; she’s no longer afraid that he can see inside her brain, and even if he could,
she no longer cares. She takes a deep breath; she looks him in the eye.

  “Hey,” he says. “How’re they treating you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good. That’s—”

  “How is Jamie? Have you talked with . . . ?”

  Peter nods. “He’s coming back next weekend. Do you remember him being here?”

  “Of course,” she says, recalling Jamie’s face, the frightened look in his eyes, the earnest way he peered at her as she lay on the tiny bed in her cell-like room. She shudders. She wishes she could have stopped him from coming, from seeing her that way, that she could have spared him that at least.

  Peter nods again. he sets his briefcase on the floor beside the couch.

  “Why am I here?”

  “You tried to jump off the George Washington Bridge,” Peter says. “We’ve been over this.”

  “No. I mean, why am I here instead of Bellevue?”

  Peter shrugs. “It’s a better hospital.”

  “No,” she says. “Bellevue is top-notch. This one’s just closer.”

  “Yes.” He shrugs again. “Yeah. It’s closer. A lot closer to the house.”

  “More convenient for you.”

  “I suppose it is, Dana.” He sighs.

  “We talked,” she says, “that first night. I begged you not to make me leave there.”

  “You were crazy.”

  “I am crazy.”

  “No,” he says. “You were crazy. Because I had you transferred here, you are now not crazy.”

  “God,” she says. “You are such a lawyer.” Part of her is almost happy to be sitting on a flowery couch, arguing with her husband. It seems like such a normal, sane thing to do.

  “So what was our illustrious detective doing here?”

  “Moss?”

  “Is there another one I don’t know about?”

  “Probably,” she says, sparring, but her heart’s not really in it.

  “Why was he here?”

  “He brought me my St. Christopher medal,” she says. “It was in the car.”