The Wife's Tale (14 page)

The ringing telephone. An answered prayer. Her heart leapt. Then she heard The Greek’s baritone on the other end of the line
and braced herself for news. But he hadn’t heard from Gooch either, and was, like Mary, increasingly worried and confused.
His questions took the tone of interrogation, and Mary felt accused. When The Greek asked again if she’d checked the bank
account, she denied that she had, realizing how fully she’d made her bed and lain in it.

In the bedroom, she threw open the closet door. Nothing was missing. Gooch’s lean wardrobe from the tall man’s shop in Windsor
was on one side and her own mess of plus-sized discount disasters on the other. Mary had never searched for clues of infidelity
before, but had read enough advice columns and watched enough prime-time to know what she was looking for. Lipstick stains
on his collars. No. The smell of perfume? She couldn’t smell anything, nothing at all. Rogue blonde hairs. No. Love notes
or telephone numbers folded into squares in the pockets of his jeans. No. She rooted behind the winter coats, where they kept
the boxes of cards and photos and VCR tapes, but nothing was amiss. She shut the closet and glanced around the room, spying
on the dresser a shoebox labeled
Business Info
. It was open, the lid tossed aside, piled high with crumpled receipts. She looked at the various chits for gas and dining
that Gooch submitted for reimbursement from The Greek.

She found a bill for a restaurant with a Toronto address, noting the date, which was the previous month, and the time, early
afternoon. Card member James Gooch had lunched on the
dly sp
and
grll chk snd
accompanied by two draft beers at a place on Queen Street. She didn’t know Gooch had gone to Toronto.

Catching sight of herself in the mirror as she passed, Mary thought of the hundreds of television shows she’d watched about
criminal investigations, the search for evidence, the thrill of justice. She settled down on the bed to examine the receipts
more closely. Nothing alarming. No motel slips or invoices from jewelers or lingerie shops. The most shocking chits were for
gas. She had had no idea it cost that much to fill the delivery truck’s tank. No wonder the planet was in peril! There was
a receipt from an auto body shop in Leamington—Gooch had mentioned trouble with the delivery truck. There was an unfilled
sleeping pill prescription from Dr. Ruttle, which was surprising, since Gooch slept like a baby. The rest were restaurant
bills that confirmed Gooch’s habit of healthy eating and his penchant for a cool draft with his midday meal.

Mary was nearly through the box when she found another receipt from a Toronto restaurant. The same restaurant, dated the week
before—egg-white omelet and draft beer. And then another dated the week before that—fish special with salad and beer. And
another, and another, twice in the same week. And another. Gooch hadn’t mentioned that he’d been to Toronto six times the
past few months, but then again, she’d never asked. Still, evidence of nothing. He’d driven there numerous times over the
years to various manufacturers from whom The Greek ordered specialty items for the store. She had not a scrap to confront
him with when he finally made it home. So what if he enjoyed dining at a place called Bistro 555?

The refrigerator hummed, but Mary didn’t hear it over the ticking of the clock.
Please. Call. Please. Call.
She looked up at the ceiling, as she’d done a thousand times before, noticing a wide crack stretching directly over the bed.
The fissure had been there all the time, grown from thin to thick, short to long, and she’d never noticed it. Or it had appeared
mysteriously in the night, the way Gooch had disappeared.

She reached for the phone once more and dialed Gooch’s number. When it was her turn to speak she said, “It’s Jimmy’s wife
again.” Then, after a pause, “Will you tell him… Happy Anniversary.”

Focused on the crack, she recalled the moment when she had left her body on the wet leaves. But in the recollection it was
not her own body over which her spirit hovered but Gooch’s. With that image, Mary left her conscious chaos for the clarity
of dreams.

T
rips to the toilet and to drink water from the tap. Aspirin for that pain between her eyes. Experimental dreams. Glimpses
of light. Weight of dark. Tap water. Urine. Flush. Gooch’s face. Light. Dark. Water. Pee. Flush. Gooch. Mary. The night clock.
Screaming at Wendy to please go away. Endlessly ticking, then ticking no more, the batteries dislodged and thrown to the floor.
Heat—the furnace hadn’t died after all.

In the hallway an amber lamp switched on in a marvel of timed circuitry, stealing into the room like a secret lover. Mary
eased her legs as the light adored her dunes, licked her licorice nipples, and sucked her frosted toes. She pulled her lids
apart and looked around the room. With the drapes drawn, she was unable to guess between day and night.

Mary rose, her foot aching where she’d been cut, confused by the sequence of her stories and their relation to her dreams.
The digital clock on Gooch’s side was blinking, which suggested that power had been lost and restored sometime in the night.
Her own thumping clock was dead. That hadn’t been a dream—she’d taken the batteries out at two o’clock. A.m. or p.m., she
couldn’t be sure. The dense gray clouds she could see through the slit in the drapes failed to disclose the sun’s position.
She had the panicky feeling that she was late. Too late. For whatever it was.

As she pulled back the drapes, her eyes were stung by the sharp white snow laid out over the landscape, so that she couldn’t
find the border of the yard or the site of Mr. Barkley’s grave. A thick layer weighting the willow and drifting over the frozen
towels in the truck. This much snow in October? Something of a miracle.

Instinctively she looked at the telephone at the bedside, noticing that the receiver had fallen off. She returned it, waited
for a dial tone and dialed her husband’s number. It was the voice who made the apology this time: “We’re sorry. This number
is no longer in service.”

Mary set the phone back down and bought several deep breaths before she dialed The Greek, who was also listed among the emergency
numbers. When Fotopolis didn’t answer that line she called the store directly and was surprised to learn that The Greek was
gone too, flown off to Athens last week to be with his dying mother. Mary cleared her throat before asking, “Did Mr. Fotopolis
speak to my husband before he left?”

The receptionist’s answer was polite and professional; she appeared to be following instructions regarding questions about
Jimmy Gooch’s disappearance. “I really don’t know anything about that,” she apologized, and then spoiled her discretion by
adding, “I have his cellphone here. Mr. Fotopolis found it in the truck. Do you want to pick it up, Mrs. Gooch? Mrs. Gooch?”

Buttoning her bloodstained nightgown, Mary set out through the front door, limping on her swollen heel in her big winter boots,
trudging through the snow covering the long, sloped driveway. There was a single set of recent vehicle tracks on the road,
and in the gully the snow-frosted newspaper. She bent to retrieve the paper but couldn’t. She kicked at the snow with her
boot and in doing so revealed another newspaper, and another, and another and another. She moved between the papers in their
thin plastic bags, reading the dates, incredulous. Except for those dreamlike trips to pee or drink, she had left her body
to itself, like a quarrelling couple who needed time apart, and had slept a full week.

Noticing that the mailbox was stuffed with correspondence, she gathered the detritus of letters and advertising pamphlets
into her arms and moved up toward the house. She passed through the front door and hobbled to the kitchen, caught by the draft
from the broken back window. She found the broom near the trash can and brushed the glass into a neat pile in the corner.
Then, with what Gooch called crazy tape and a piece of cardboard from her recycling efforts, she attended to the draft.

Energized by the exercise and carrying the broom like a pole vault, she limped outdoors once again, with the tape and cardboard
and several large green trash bags, to construct a cover for the truck’s jammed-open roof. She brushed the snow from the interior,
where it had piled on the seat and drifted to the floor, opened a trash bag and swept the chocolate into it; flinching, she
remembered the crow.

As her broom caught the debris from beneath the front seat, a few small, shiny cards fluttered to the ground. She felt her
flesh quivering as she worked the broom deeper under the seat, dislodging more of the cards—gold and silver foil strips. Losing
instant lottery tickets. Dozens and dozens of them. Along with crumpled wrappers from a hundred mini chocolate bars. The couple’s
secrets were that pitifully concealed. She climbed inside the truck and began her work on the sunroof.

Tramping wet snow, she returned to the house and found the sink, running the tap and drinking several long glasses of water
before moving toward the table, where she collapsed into her red vinyl chair. She looked across the cold tile floor to the
silent refrigerator. Not a morsel of food had she ingested in a full week and still hunger’s chord was distant, a realization
that pleased and alarmed Mary in equal measure.

At the table she sat with the mail—a foreign task, since in their unspoken assignment of chores the mail, which really meant
the bills, fell on Gooch, or he’d insisted on being responsible, she couldn’t remember. She separated the pamphlets and coupons,
setting the bills aside in a neat stack for Gooch to deal with later. She opened an overdue sympathy card from a distant relation
and read the sentiments about Orin twice, all the while ignoring the small square envelope she’d spotted right off, addressed
to
Mrs. Mary Gooch
in Gooch’s scratchy writing. She paused to look at the Kenmore again but, like a spurned lover, it wouldn’t meet her eye.

Finally she picked up the envelope. Opening it, she found the note, the one she’d always expected, the one she’d stopped expecting,
delivered unexpectedly through the Leaford post. Forgoing the cliché of trembling hand, she read Gooch’s scrawl on the square
silvery paper:

Dear Mary,

I’m sorry. I wish I knew what else to say. There’s money in the account. Twenty-five thousand dollars. It’s yours. I won it
on the scratch game. Nothing nefarious. Trust me and don’t be afraid to spend it. I didn’t plan this, Mary. I need some time
to think. I hate myself for being such a coward—if that means anything. I promise I’ll be in touch.

He had signed the note
Yours
, a term he’d never used before, leaving her with the impression that she’d been mistaken for someone else. She folded the
piece of paper and put it back inside the envelope.
Nefarious
. What kind of person used a word like that? And
Yours
. Why would he write
Yours
when the very fact of the note suggested he was decisively not hers?

There was nothing, no thing, in which Mary could confidently believe. It seemed impossible, or at least unlikely, that her
husband had won a colossal amount of money in the scratch-and-win lottery and had left her on their twenty-fifth anniversary,
to
think
, and would be
in touch
, but there it was, in ballpoint ink on drugstore stationery which he’d likely bought for the purpose. She rose and, stepping
on the can to pop the lid, pitched his note into the trash.

She could hear the sound of her husband’s words like a movie voice-over as she carried herself to the bathroom—
I didn’t plan this, Mary. I need some time to think.
With the shower roaring to drown him out, she slipped off her robe and kicked free of the winter boots. Stripped bare and
holding the support rail Gooch had installed for her years ago, she stepped over the tub and found her balance on the rubber
bath mat, where her foot leaked bands of blood.

Finding the costly bath products Gooch had given her last Christmas, Mary poured them over herself all at once. Cheeks scrubbed
pink, she dried her skin with a clean towel, noticing that there was somewhat less of herself than in previous days. Her bloodstained
nightgown too foul to put back on, she stood naked before the bathroom mirror, rifling through a drawer full of hair products,
finally finding a large comb. She drew it through her hair, pulling strands from her face until she could see only her gray
roots, startled for the first time in her life by her resemblance to her mother. But it was not a curve of bone that Mary
recognized, not a similar nose or pattern of aging. It was the look in her eyes, of frozen confusion. The look Irma wore when
her existence had become inconceivable.

Gooch had been gone for a week. The letter said he needed time to think. But where had he gone? And how much time was enough?
And what if he never came back? Had he really won the lottery? Frozen confusion. But even seeing her mother’s expression mirrored
in her eyes, Mary didn’t worry that she might have Irma’s disease. She was convinced that her doom would be more poetic. A
massive coronary was what she’d envisioned, and she felt on the verge of it with the absence of Gooch. She reached for the
hair dryer, noticing the box of red hair color from that day of Orin’s funeral.

Time passed with no tick from the clock. Mary stood before the bathroom mirror, unwrapping a towel from her head. She shook
out her mane, more auburn than red, thinking how her mother would have advised against such a brazen look, deciding it was
marginally better than those awful gray roots.

In the bedroom she searched her drawers and found a clean pair of navy scrubs, no longer snug at the waistband but loose enough
that she had to draw the string. She opened the closet and, after some searching, found her second clean set of navy scrubs,
which she folded and placed in a large brown vinyl purse, along with a never-used overnight kit containing dental needs and
hair care and her charged cellphone and the cord that had come with it.