The Pocket Wife

by Susan Crawford

  She doesn’t really want to see her husband. She certainly doesn’t want him there inside her room, undoing all her progress with his sneers and caustic comments—with his presence. She doesn’t want him picking up her suitcase or opening the car door. She wants him gone. Without her pills to calm her, she would drive to the ends of the earth to get away from him. Now, though, serene and medicated, she only wants to lie across her bed and think about the things she’s recently experienced, the expanding and contracting of the world around her, the way her filters seemed to thin and finally disappear, allowing time and space to flow out of sync. She wants the quiet and the solitude to absorb the knowledge that her husband no longer loves her. A painful thought at best, but for Dana, who has leaned on Peter many times throughout their married life, turned to him in the wee hours to pour into his drowsy ear all the bizarre images her sleeplessness has conjured, it is particularly disconcerting, especially now. For Dana, time is running short. The drugs have done their tricks, they’ve successfully turned down the volume in her head, but they’ve not erased the events of the past weeks.

  She knows Jack Moss will soon arrest her. She saw it in his eyes when he brought her St. Christopher medal to the hospital. When they sat together in the dayroom, she heard it in the slight hesitation, the slight catch in his voice. She knew it from the way he watched her walking to her room, unaware she could see him reflected in the glass of the nurses’ window, the way he shook his head just once, folding his arms across his chest. She can’t afford to loll. Lolling is for other people or for her in another time or place. Right now she’ll smile and nod, the model patient, gracious and grateful. Unctuous, if need be. But once she’s out of here, she’ll go back off the meds that dull her, drain her energy, rein in her thoughts. She needs every ounce of drive and strength and courage she can gather. Just for a little while. She’s had a chance to rest; she’s had a chance to pull herself together, to regroup, as her mother used to say. She’s Scotch-taped back together, and she prays the tape will hold.

  The photo in the phone seemed so trivial only days before. When Moss told her what Ronald said, she’d barely blinked. It was the meds, she thinks now; they made everything seem trivial, which she supposes is the point. But now, with this great gift that Ronald handed her—risking his own neck, casting himself as the jealous husband in this eerie play—she understands. She’s begun to trust her perceptions, her memory. Almost. There are still the giant gaps that afternoon, and even though she knows that her memory was accurate up to a point, it doesn’t mean she didn’t kill Celia. It only means she had a damn good motive.

  She doesn’t judge Peter. She prefers not to judge him. It isn’t that he slept with her friend. It isn’t that he hid it from her—that and the mysterious Tart. She now sees he played with her perceptions, marched her toward insanity, deliberately or not. But it isn’t even these things, these obvious and concrete things she hates him for. It’s not the thises and thats of it all—the things she can point to and say, Here is what you’ve done. You see? And this! And this! It’s what she can’t point to, what she can’t exactly see, what she knows lurks there behind the shapes and textures of things. It’s the gray he’s made of her life that makes her hate him. It isn’t what Peter has given or not given her over the years, it’s what he’s taken away—the colors, and music, and tastes—the sweetness of things, the bright orbs he’s molded and fiddled into small, dull blobs.

  She understands about the Poet, that he is a symbol. She knows now it isn’t the Poet she longs for but the girl who loved him. And her sessions with Dr. Ghea have allowed her to recognize that for people like her there is a slight, thin space between happiness and madness, that it’s a tightrope walk, a balance between light and dark, that she will struggle all her life to find it and, once she does, to keep it.

  She feels raw; she feels vulnerable and fragile, unequipped to deal with Celia’s death, sitting like a boulder in the pit of her stomach. In her sessions she only vaguely alluded to it—Celia was her neighbor, she’d told Dr. Ghea. It haunts her sometimes, what happened. It’s so blurry, that whole afternoon. She’d had too much to drink, she’d once said, laughing, folding and unfolding her hands, and that really bothers her. She’d looked up at Dr. Ghea through her lashes, giving her a chance to question, to interrogate, to probe, but Dr. Ghea had only jotted something down on a pad of paper and asked her why she’d chosen the word “haunted.”

  “Well, really, I could have killed her, for all I know,” Dana had said, but she laughed when she said it, standing up and crossing the room to pour herself a glass of water.

  Dr. Ghea hadn’t brought it up again, and neither had Dana. They talked about other, less depressing things. They talked about hopeful, happy things, and she was glad the moment passed unnoticed, the hinted-at confession, but she was disappointed, too, that her demons weren’t discerned, her ghosts, her guilt, that Dr. Ghea didn’t pull a bottle from her coat and shake out a pill to fix her.

  She stands up. She grabs her suitcase and without a backward glance walks to the lobby where Peter waits to take her home. She’ll stick to her plan. She won’t let anger for her husband clog her thoughts, won’t let her rage derail her.

  CHAPTER 39

  Even though she’s called ahead, Jack Moss seems slightly surprised to see Dana standing there in his doorway. “Moss?”

  “Come in. Come in,” he says, standing up and ushering her in with his arm. He sounds too jovial for the occasion, and Dana stares down at her feet planted on the cruddy, scratched-up floor. Her father used to talk that way, sitting at his desk at the office or in the little cubbyhole room upstairs where he did his writing. “Come in the house,” he used to say, swiveling his chair around to face the door. “Come in the house,” even though she was either already in the house or at his office downtown, impossibly far away from the house. He always said it loudly, animatedly, as if he were throwing a party and was afraid no one would come. It was a warning, her father’s overzealous welcomes. They told her he would soon be coming home later at night—that the house would smell like spilled gin, that tiny bits of poems would soon be scattered on the rug.

  “Thanks for seeing me.” She doesn’t sit down. Without her dulling meds, she’s restless once again, bright and scattered, walking a thin, slight line.

  “Sure.” Jack thumbs through piles of papers on his desk and pulls out a manila envelope. “Copies,” it says. “Dana Catrell.” “Have a seat. I can let you look at these, but I can’t let you take them out of here in case they become part of—”

  “It’s okay. I just wanted to have a quick—”

  “Right,” he says. “Sit. Take a load off. These are copies. The originals are on file.”

  She nods. She sits down. She scrutinizes the notes, the handwriting, commits them to memory, so she can bring them back, sharp as tacks, when she closes her eyes.

  “So you doing all right?”

  “Fine,” she says. “Never better.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No. God.”

  “How’s Spot?”

  “Fine,” she says.

  “So why’d you want these back?”

  She shrugs. “I feel naked without them?”

  Jack looks up and smiles. Still, Dana knows he’s planning to arrest her. She almost doesn’t care at this point, but there’s Jamie to consider. For Jamie she’ll do everything she can to stay on top of things. “I kept them in an envelope,” Dana says. “A self-addressed envelope. Stamped and everything.”

  He nods. “I saw that.”

  “I figured it was a federal offense to tamper with the U.S. mail, so people might be less apt to—”

  “Clever,” Jack says, but he’s no longer smiling.

  “Paranoid.”

  Jack shrugs. “Semantics. Mind if I ask you a couple questions while you’re here?”

  “Would it matter?”

  “Probably not.” He shoots her a little fake smile. “Did you ever figure out who the Tart
is?”

  “No. I was sure it was Peter’s secretary, but I met her at his office yesterday when I went down to work out some things with him. Her name is Ms. Bradley. Very sweet, very demure, but not the woman in the photo. Not the Tart.”

  “You sure? People can change, you know. Be completely different when they aren’t at work.”

  Dana fidgets with her purse strap. “She did seem annoyingly. . . present or something.”

  “Not all that hard to change the way they look either.”

  “And she had on this . . .”

  “This what?”

  “This wide, knitted turquoise thing that went around her head; I remarked on it. It was really pretty. It did totally hide her hair, though.”

  “So, really, she could have been Peter’s . . .”

  She shrugs. “For all I know, the Tart’s one of his clients. But I’ve got other priorities at the moment. And Peter’s . . .”

  “Peter’s what?”

  “Gone,” she says.

  “You okay with that?” This is a surprise.

  “As okay as I am with anything.”

  Jack plays with a little mound of paper clips on his desk.

  “Well.” She stands up, eases herself toward the hall. “Time, she fleets.” Another unexpected little father saying.

  “Dana?”

  “I know,” she says, turning around in the doorway. “I won’t go far.”

  “Good,” he says. “But I was going to say I’m really glad to see you out and about.”

  She wonders, hurrying down the hallway, if Jack Moss questioned her about the Tart because he’s worried she might go crazy jealous and kill again. A serial husband’s-girlfriends killer. He’s hiding something, trying to hide something. He didn’t look her in the eye—he barely even looked up—kept screwing around with his paper clips. It’s probably those notes she practically forced on him. He must think she wrote them, as does Peter. As I’m beginning to, she realizes. Again she thinks of Jamie, driving in from Boston to visit her, having to see his mother shuffling through a locked-down psych ward, slurring her words, clutching a St. Christopher medal, and she’s determined to keep herself together for his sake.

  She sits in her front seat and looks around the parking lot. It’s nearly dark, much later than she’d thought. It was an impulse, coming here to get the notes back from Moss. Now she wishes she’d never mentioned the damn things. What was she thinking? Now they’re sitting in a file somewhere waiting to be used against her, to prove she’s some lunatic scrawling nasty, cryptic threats to herself in peacock blue—an off-putting color she doesn’t normally use, doesn’t even remember buying the expensive fountain pen. She found it in the desk drawer by the door when she was searching for clues and figured it belonged to Peter or, more likely, one of his clients. And then she kept forgetting to ask him, even though she’d left it on the desk so she’d remember.

  She sits for a moment watching the sunset rage orange across the sky. She wanted to see the notes again so she could compare them to the bits of manuscript she managed to save from her manic episode in college. She has a houseful of things she’s written over the years; she was, after all, an English major back at NYU. But these threatening notes were different. They were written in such tiny script, in a way she’s never written anything besides the manuscript back then, the hundreds of pages she covered in smaller and smaller writing as the weeks wore on, as her madness gathered, clotting like a cancer in her brain.

  Once home, when she’d first gotten off her flattening, uninspiring meds, she’d gone through every room, through every box, looking for the manuscript, phoning Peter in the end; she was that determined. And he had helped, ironically, remembered where he’d put the things she’d gathered from her mother’s house after she died, during the distressing forage through her childhood things.

  She starts the car. The sun slides down behind a stretch of grass. She pulls out of the parking lot and trails her hand in a small and unseen wave toward Jack’s office.

  Come in the house, she thinks again. Come in the house. Her father’s voice, an echo down the tunnel of her ear. A warning. Rain pounds, thuds like tiny stones against the windshield, tugs down the night like a great dark curtain. Her foot is heavy on the gas. The Toyota slides a little on the slippery street, and Dana eases up, braking slightly. The car behind her shines its lights too brightly on the narrow road, and Dana speeds up again, but only a little, only enough to satisfy whoever it is riding her tail—far too close for these wet roads. In the rearview mirror, she sees only the bright lights, the high beams, blinding her. She glances in the side mirror, sees an outline, a sedan. The lights are too bright, the night too dark and rainy; she can’t see a face. “Slow down!” she shouts, her voice a pin drop in the fury of the rain, the brilliance of the lights. She glares into the rearview mirror as the car speeds up again, comes within an inch of the Toyota, and she thinks about the notes: “You will pay for what you did—”

  The car behind her honks, not quite a blare but more than a tap, and then it speeds up again, looming like a meteor in the rearview mirror. Dana rams her foot down on the gas, stares at the headlights as they grow larger, brighter, in the mirror. She feels a knock as the car behind her hits the Toyota—a tiny ping—or is it the storm? A branch? Dana’s heart pounds; the rain falls in sheets. She looks back at the road, but it’s too late. Lightning flashes, a quick, blinding zigzag that illuminates a tree branch directly in front of her, and Dana turns the wheel, a violent twist as her tires skid and slip, losing their grip, moving the Toyota in a wild sideways movement. She turns the wheel sharply back the other way, but she continues sliding, hydroplaning on the rain-slicked road. The Toyota bumps off the asphalt, grazing branches and a small clump of hedges, coming to an abrupt and jarring stop in a shallow ditch beside the road. Dana is vaguely aware of a car above her on the highway, screeching to a stop. Its headlights veer back onto the road as a second car pulls up behind it. A couple sloshes from their car toward her in the pouring rain, and Dana makes two phone calls, one to AAA and one to Jack Moss.

  The couple insists on waiting. It isn’t safe out here, they tell her, not for a woman alone. Not on a night like this. Not these days with all the crime. They wait inside their car, the windshield wipers swishing back and forth. Their headlights are a beacon for the tow truck, a comfort in the dark, wet night.

  Jack picks up on the second ring. “Moss here,” he says.

  “I think someone just tried to kill me,” Dana says. Her teeth chatter even though it isn’t really cold.

  “Who is this?”

  “Dana Catrell. I didn’t know who to—”

  “Where are you?” A chair squeaks, and she pictures him at his desk, working late, his nice, dry office.

  “In a ditch,” Dana says. “But I’m fine. I mean, I’m not hurt or anything. The tow truck’s on its way.”

  “What happened?” The chair squeaks again.

  “I was . . . like I said. Someone forced me off the road. It was raining, and the road was slick, and this car just kept getting closer and closer, and there was this tiny whack on the bumper, just a thump, and then there was this branch right in front of me, and I. . . swerved, I guess, to miss it, and my car slid off the road.”

  “And the car behind you?”

  “Well,” she says. “They stopped, and then this other car pulled over and the first car took off.”

  “Did you report it?”

  “I am reporting it,” she says. “I’m reporting it to you.”

  She hears a shuffling sort of sound. She wonders if he’s fidgeting with his papers or possibly the mound of paper clips. “Can you describe the car?”

  “No,” she says. “It was raining really hard, and the brights were shining in my rearview mirror.”

  “Listen,” he says, and the chair is a screech in the background. “Maybe they were just obnoxious people trying to get around you. Trying to get you to speed up.”

  “Right.”


  “Is it possible? Considering what’s been happening lately, you might be a little on edge.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Well, I should go. The tow truck is here.”

  “Wait,” he says. “We need to talk again, Dana.”

  “When?” She gathers her things and pushes at the car door, and her heart leaps and dives behind her ribs. “My dance card’s pretty full these days.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Should I go on in or ask for you at the—”

  “No. I won’t be in the office in the morning. I’ll be out in the field. How about you meet me at E.Claire’s. You know it?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Why there?”

  “Why not there?”

  “Umm. It’s kind of like going down the rabbit hole for tea?”

  “Oh.” He clears his throat.

  “Hey,” she says, waving to the tow-truck driver as he backs in toward the Toyota. “It’s fine. It’s great. They’ve got killer cinnamon rolls. Or—um— What time?”

  “Ten-thirty.”

  Dana sits for a moment longer in her car, watching as the tow truck rumbles back and forth, positioning itself for rescue. A crazy day, an insane day; it plays across her mind like a bad movie. In spite of what Moss said, she knows that what happened on the road was not just chance. Her senses are once more alert—far more so, she thinks, than his. Her intuition is sparking back on track. The driver of the car behind her was no stranger, no random driver anxious to make it to a dinner date on time. There was something in the jarring way the car came up behind her, tapped her bumper, the angry lights on high beam, blinding her, the horn puncturing the sounds of rain and night like a snarl. Something very personal. No. This time Jack Moss is wrong.

  The tow-truck driver clamps a giant hook to the Toyota. The Good Samaritans wave heartily out their car window and pull onto the road as Dana yells thank-yous to them over the steady rumbling of the truck. She stands on the puddly embankment, clutching her purse, shivering. Her hands are clammy and wet. Her heart pounds. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a car pull over to the side of the road, but when she turns to look, there’s nothing there.