The Wife's Tale (31 page)

Dressed in her pressed navy scrubs, and after leaving a five-dollar bill on the bed for the maids, she set out for the lobby.
There, she requested of the male receptionist, whom she’d never seen before, the favor of a call to the taxi company. Before
he could respond, she said, “I know it’ll take a while. I’ll be over there reading.”

“The taxi guy is in there,” the young man said, pointing at the hotel restaurant down the hall. “He’s a big fat guy with a
toupee.” He was suddenly red-faced, realizing his gaffe.

In the restaurant, she spied the rotund taxi driver lost in a newspaper at a table near the window. “Excuse me,” she began,
pointing at a car in the parking lot. “Is that your taxi?”

The man set down his newspaper, smiling warmly. “Where do you need to go?”

With an urge to adjust his hair, Mary answered, “Willow Drive.” Unlike the taxi driver she’d ridden with the previous day,
this man was friendly and chatty as they climbed into the car. “Lucky you found me before I ordered,” he said. “They put up
a good breakfast here. And you would love their lunch buffet.”

From a distance she counted nearly a dozen day workers waiting at the utility pole. She strained to look as the taxi drew
closer but could not find the face of Ernesto. Jesús García had said he worked at the plaza, but Mary was still disappointed
not to see him among the hungry men in the dusty lot.

Between the men’s faded blue legs, her eye caught a flash of color—a flourish of pink garden roses in a soda bottle vase.
And another bouquet of flowers scattered on the ground nearby. She imagined that one of the day workers had brought the flowers
to beautify their surroundings. Or maybe teenaged lovers had rendezvoused there the previous night. “Mexicans,” the driver
muttered under his breath as they passed.

As the taxi joined the throngs on the main road heading in the direction of the Willow Highlands, the driver claimed knowledge
of every alley and side street from Camarillo to Pasadena, freely sharing his classified secrets about the best routes to
take to places she’d never go at various times of the day and on certain days of the week. “But if you’re heading into L.A.
you gotta be on the road before six or you’re dead at the 405.”

“Twenty-four,” Mary said, pointing.

“You’re thinking 23, which takes you up to Simi Valley.”

“Twenty-four,” she repeated. “Right there. The house. Please.” She noticed the Prius in the driveway, but no other vehicle.
Gooch was not there. Yet.

As she crept up the cracked walkway of the small white house, she could not reconcile the chill she felt with the full glare
of the sun. A scent. Familiar. Electricity, but not a storm—the storm was past. Something burnt. Hair on Irma’s curling iron.
Popcorn in the microwave. A
fait accompli
.

She knocked once, sensing a presence. Eden opened the door, her half-raised face fallen completely, her eyes wide and startled.
That deer-in-the-headlights dementia she’d seen in Irma’s eyes. Frozen confusion—she knew it well. There was that chill.

“I made tea,” Eden said, and started back toward the kitchen. Mary followed, closing the door behind her, entombed. Jack.
Where was Jack? She saw it clearly now. Jack was dead, and Eden was stunned. That was the look. Even expected death, even
merciful death, was shocking. Here today, gone tomorrow. Jack present, Jack picked. No more jumping candlesticks.

“You found your purse,” Eden remarked when they reached the kitchen.

Mary nodded, glancing past her into the room where the sick man slept. The bed was empty. She pushed forward to look for the
motorized chair. It was not in the room. “Eden? Where’s Jack?”

“He wasn’t here. Thank the Lord.”

“Where is he?”

“It’s Tuesday. Or is it Thursday?” Mary didn’t know for certain, but thought it was Wednesday. “The church group takes a few
of them out to the park for an hour every other day. I can never remember which day is the other one.” Eden leaned against
the counter. “I made tea.”

“Tea sounds good.”

“They all drink iced tea down here. I never have got used to that. I like my tea hot. Two cubes. Do you want a cube?”

Mary typically took four sugar cubes, and cream rather than milk. “Just black.”

“I suppose the money and all was gone.”

“The wallet was gone,” Mary said, sipping, “but I found my passport.”

Eden nodded but hadn’t heard. “You haven’t heard from Jimmy, have you?” Her mother-in-law’s tone implied that she wasn’t keeping
secrets about Gooch after all.

“He has no way to contact me, Eden. He doesn’t know where I am, remember?”

Something caught Eden’s attention, and in an instant she was out the sliding patio doors, sidestepping the murky pool with
a broom in her hand to beat the devil out of a cowering green bush. “Get out!” she screamed. “Get out!”

This was the mother Gooch had described to Mary on that first night under the serious moonlight. The one who made scenes.
The one who’d thrown her husband’s clothes into the Rideau Canal. She wondered briefly if Eden had started drinking again.

Following her outside, Mary saw no creature scamper from the bush as her mother-in-law slashed wildly, cracking branches,
scattering leaves. “Eden? Eden?” Avoiding the swinging broom, Mary drew closer, calling, “It’s gone. It ran out that way.”

Eden set down the broom. “Was it a rat?”

“No! My God, do you have
rats?
”

“Of course we have rats. Everyone has rats. And we do not use God to exclaim. Jack would be so upset if he heard that.”

“Thank the Lord Jack wasn’t here for what?” Mary asked.

“The call,” Eden sighed, scouring the yard for the rodent.

“The call?”

“They found Heather.”

Mary pitied the poor woman her confusion, then panicked. “You don’t mean they found Gooch? Eden? Who called?”

“The police called.” Mary’s heart beat wildly. “They found Heather. In a motel room in Niagara Falls.”

“Heather?”

“They said it was an accidental overdose.”

“Heather?”

“I wanted to laugh when they said they didn’t suspect foul play. It’s all foul. Her whole wasted life.”

“Overdose?” Mary repeated, sure Eden must be mistaken. She’d just seen Heather, with her beautiful face and her big silver
locket and her nicotine chewing gum and her new-found son. “When? When did this happen?”

“Yesterday.”

“But I just saw her. I just saw her in Toronto. She was different, Eden. She’d changed. I told you.”

“I’ve been expecting that call since she was a teenager, Mary. People don’t change.”

But people did change. Whole countries changed. They were all just the sum of their habits. “She
had
changed.”

“They said she was using an alias,” Eden said dryly. “Mary Brody.”

Mary struggled to breathe. Heather Gooch dead at forty-nine. In a motel room in Niagara Falls. Accidental overdose? No, Mary
thought, calculated risk. Dead of calculated risk. The death part had been an accident, but she’d known the risk she was taking.
Might have told herself,
Just this one last time,
as she took that foul journey, led astray by certain old associates, the siren’s lure of the altered state. Having been seduced
by the Kenmore for most of her life, Mary understood only too well.

Foul play. A wasted life. How? Seated on the toilet? Alone? Or had someone been there to hold her hand? Hear her beg forgiveness?
Whisper goodbye? Heather. Ah, beauty. A
fait accompli
. The rule of three. The triangle complete. But Jack soon to begin another, to replenish the fear of the second and the worry
over the third.
You can group your tragedies in threes or thirties, Mare.
Maybe Gooch had been right about that too.

“Will there be a funeral?”

Eden shook her head. “She had a will, if you can believe someone as reckless and irresponsible as Heather would go to the
trouble of making a will. She wanted to be cremated. No funeral. She left everything to Jimmy. Not that she had anything but
debt, I’m sure. Jimmy’ll have to figure out what to do with her ashes when he gets back. I wouldn’t have a clue.”

“Gooch’ll know what to do,” Mary agreed, moved by Eden’s certainty that he would in fact return.

“Lord have mercy on her soul,” Eden whispered, casting her eyes heavenward.

“Amen,” Mary said, surprising herself.

Eden took another deep breath, casting her eyes over the green pool. “We had a lap pool at our last house. I swam a hundred
laps a day.”

“A hundred laps?” A hundred oaks. A hundred shoes. A hundred Heathers.

“I was very fit for my age.” Eden had no more to say on the subject of her daughter’s untimely death. No confessions of remorse
or regret. No mournful lamentations. No hot tears filling her eyes.

Returning to the house, noticing the disarray, Mary asked, “Did your helper call in sick again?”

“It’s her son this time. She has four children and one of them’s always sick. She’s the third girl since we moved.”

“What time is prayer circle?” Mary asked.

“Two-thirty.”

“Do you want to lie down?”

“Yes, Mary. I do,” Eden answered, shuffling toward the door. She stopped, sighing deeply, and whispered to the hallway, “I
wish Jimmy were here.”

It was no use telling dry-eyed Eden to let it all out. It would let itself out when it was damn good and ready, Mary knew.
“Me too,” she said.

A short time later, as Mary was stretching plastic wrap over the culinary offerings, the front door opened with the sound
of clanking metal and quiet voices. She peered down the hallway to see Jack in his motorized wheelchair being assisted into
the house by two pleasant-looking men. She waited until the men had settled him into his bedroom before sliding out the back
door. As eager as she was to get to the bank to sort out her account, she felt bound to stay until Eden woke, as she believed
in saying goodbye.

She stopped in the backyard to enjoy the warm breeze, sweeping aside the broken branches on the ground, and found a chair
to rest in at the green pool’s edge. Looking up into the blue sky, she thought of the shooting star and felt a wash of shame
remembering the gratitude in the bleeding man’s eyes. She had done so little for Ernesto. And
nada
for Heather. She hadn’t done as much for her broken sister-in-law in the past twenty-five years as a half-dozen strangers
had done for her in recent days. She imagined Heather’s obituary in the
Leaford Mirror
. Survived by her mother, Eden Asquith of Golden Hills, California, a brother, James, and sister-in-law, Mary Gooch, of Leaford,
Ontario. Son James, a medical student in Toronto.

She thought of her own left-behinds. A mother, a husband, the bones of a cat. Heather Gooch had left a son who might one day
cure cancer. Or save multiple lives. Or just be a contributing member of society. Mary allowed herself a soupçon of bitterness.
She would leave no one without a mother, and had made no mark on society. She didn’t even vote.

She heard a rhythmic ticking, not the clock but a woodpecker in a tall eucalyptus near the fence. She thought of the night
clock on the bedside table of her small rural home. The ticking of time. The machinations of denial. But her appetite for
denial had been left, along with her appetite for food, in the fluted brown cups of Laura Secord chocolates.

Watching her wide, rippling reflection in the greasy green pool, she wondered how such a large woman had made so little impact
on her little world. Of course, there would be people who missed her, who missed her now. The old folks at St. John’s Nursing
Home. A few of the customers at Raymond Russell’s would have asked about her. But what was she really
leaving?
Like a tribe and a plan, a person needed a legacy. She could see that now, too.

At two o’clock Mary couldn’t wait any longer, and padded to the back bedroom, rousing Eden with a gentle shake to her shoulders.
“I put plastic on everything.”

Eden nodded, rising from the bed, propelled into the hall by a retching sound from Jack’s room. Mary stood still, unsure what
to do as the hacking and gagging continued. In a moment Eden appeared, holding a towel animated by shivering bloody mucus.
Mary looked away.

“Please don’t go in there,” Eden said, by way of goodbye.

Anxious to leave, Mary made her way to the door.

“Mary?” Eden called. Mary turned, waiting. “Will you come back tomorrow?” Her voice was small. “I just can’t count on Chita.”

Mary nodded, hiding her surprise. “I could come back tonight,” she offered hopefully.

“Come in the morning. He’s awake for a few hours then. Sometimes he cries.”

Poor Eden, Mary thought. A lost daughter. A departing husband. Mary had never considered that she might one day have so much
in common with her mother-in-law.

W
alking out the front door, Mary could not shake thoughts of Heather Gooch. So lost was she in her contemplation of her sister-in-law’s
life and death that she didn’t see the black vehicle pull up in her periphery, and didn’t recognize the voice of Ronni Reeves
calling from the driver’s window, “Do you need a ride somewhere?”

The young mother looked different. No lipstick. Stringy blonde locks leaking from a floral scarf on her head. Blemishes on
her forehead that Mary hadn’t noticed before. She decided not to count the woman’s appearance as a miracle. Not even a wild
coincidence—this town was as small as Leaford, and she lived on the same street, after all. “Thanks,” she said, opening the
car door. “I’m just going down to the bank at the plaza.”

“That’s easy,” Ronni Reeves said, brushing Cheerios from the leather upholstery.

Looking into the back seat, Mary found the triplets dressed in white karate robes, two of the boys asleep with their heads
joined ear to crown. Joshua, the runaway imp, clutched an enormous bag of Cheetos, his lips and fingers and white uniform
stained orange as the setting sun. He studied her from his car seat, his face twisting into a grimace.

“Did your car break down? It was Mary, right?” Ronni Reeves asked, when Mary was arranged in the seat.