The Pocket Wife (27 page)

“Maybe you shouldn't say any more.”

“It was over that fast. In the blink of—” She snaps her fingers. “I never meant . . .”

“What time was this?”

Lenora shrugs. “I wasn't wearing a watch,” she says. “I had this cheap one. You get what you pay for, I guess. The strap broke.”

He feels his stomach plunge. He feels a giant letdown, wonders if he should have put the pieces together sooner, if Lenora threw him off his game with her . . . allure. In any case it's a waste. Brains. Beauty. She's got it all. Had it all. Even if she can pull off self-defense, her career is toast. And that was what Lenora lived for. He stands up, but he doesn't look her in the eyes; he looks slightly to the left of them. “We really need to go. Rob's waiting for us down at booking.”

Lenora nods. Her hands are pressed against the coffee cup, as if she's warming them. She fiddles with her silverware, looks
around the room for a minute and then she finishes her coffee and stands up to go, straightens her skirt, pulls her hands through her hair, but Jack still has an unsettled feeling. The vagueness nags at him. He's a perfectionist, meticulous. He wishes the timeline were tighter, that he knew exactly how much time elapsed between Lenora's departure and the arrival of the ambulance. Did Ronald waste precious minutes? Did he hesitate to call the EMTs out of anger or fear or, hell, revenge? Did he look at his dying wife and amble out to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? Pour himself a drink? Jack sighs. He'll never know for sure. In the end, though, it was Lenora who struck the fatal blow, and if Ronald's got secrets, maybe they don't have anything to do with the case.

“So where is Celia's phone now?” she says once they're on the road, once he's Mirandized her. He doesn't bother cuffing her; she isn't even sitting in the backseat. She knows the system. She knows not to make things worse by putting up a fight. The kicker is she was damn good at her job.

“Deleted. Destroyed,” he says, “both the photo
and
the phone, as far as I know.”

“Good.” Her face is pale but slightly gray, like a soiled sheet or snow in the city.

“Did you go back afterward,” he says, “to Ashby Lane? Mess with Dana?”

“It was my case.
Would
have been my case. I went back a few times, did a little undercover work. Peter was pressuring me. ‘See what you can find out,' he kept saying. ‘The woman lived right down the street from us.' I was doing my job.” She shrugs. “When Dana had that stupid brunch, I walked in with some of the neighbors, strolled around their living room, chatted with some British woman—stuck a few things here and there while Peter was in the
kitchen brownnosing his wife, convincing her I was there to drop off some papers.”

“Stuck things here and there?”

Lenora tosses her head as if she's forgotten she's cut her hair short. “My hand wipes under the sofa, a note in her book, a pen in the desk drawer, that sort of thing. I went to their street, their yard once or twice.”

“Anybody see you?”

“She did. Dana did. At least I think she did. Once. In their backyard. And then another time their neighbor saw me from his window. He came out after me one night in the middle of a storm—short guy in a raincoat. And then there was the time Dana drove herself into a ditch.”

“You run her off the road?”

“No! I was . . . I admit I was following her, and I did get a little. . . well, actually, a lot too close, but what happened was all her. That was all Dana. She totally freaked and lost control of the wheel, zigzagged off the road. Someone pulled over to help her, or I would have called it in. Anonymously, but I would've called it in.”

“Peter ever . . . ?”

“He never saw me.” She laughs a bitter little half laugh like a twig snapping. “Even when we were together, he never really saw me.”

They ride in silence for a block or two. Outside gloom settles across the sky and trickles down to the street. Rain again, but today Jack will be glad for it, will welcome it; today it suits his mood. He glances across the front seat at the side of Lenora's perfect, unlined face. “So why the notes?”

“Since when is writing notes a crime?” she says. “A lost art, maybe. Not a crime. Gum?” She pulls out a pack of Dentyne Ice and extends it toward him. He shakes his head. Her eyes are blank and hard, like chunks of coal. She reaches over and turns on the radio, finds a rock station. Music surges through the car. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it's fine.”

She turns away. She looks out the window, where raindrops splatter on the glass and land in puddles on the road. She moves back and forth in time to the music. It's a new song, something Jack has never heard before, something Kyle would listen to. She taps her fingers against the clasp of her bag. When she moves her head again, he sees that her eyes are closed. He watches her out of the corner of his eye—watches the ice begin to crack, the fissures forming, brittle and thin as a membrane, the porcelain princess splintering across an ice-cream skirt.

He reaches for his phone, picks up the message he'd been too preoccupied to notice before, a message left while he was with George that morning, when he stood in the airless closet of a lab with no phone signal. He listens to it now, as Lenora bobs to grating techno rock, her bangs across one eye. “Hey,” Kyle's voice says, and Jack manages a smile in spite of the madness of the afternoon, in spite of the racket from the radio and the unraveling of the self-contained and beautiful assistant prosecutor. “I'm working at the lumberyard this weekend,” the message says, “but I've got this Sunday off. If you can come by for dinner, there's a couple people here I'd like for you to meet.” And with his phone pressed tightly up against his ear, Jack can just barely hear a baby crying in the distance; somewhere a woman sings. Maryanne, he thinks, or Margie. Across the seat Lenora begins to shake her head more wildly, knocking it against the window, harder and harder. He pulls the Crown Vic over to the side of the road and radios for help, for the EMTs, gives them a location as he pins Lenora's arms against her sides and thinks of Dana bolting from her car and trying to fly.

D
ana sets down the gallon can of pale gold paint she bought at Home Depot the day before. Parts of one dining-room wall are filled with swatches, and two lopsided peach squares from a discarded Martha Stewart sample tin dapple another. She eyes the dining room, the bland paint, so faded it's difficult to say exactly what color it once was. Autumn Wheat, she thinks, but she isn't sure.

She ties her hair in a bandanna, closes Spot onto the back porch, and tugs a sweatshirt over a tank top and a pair of jeans. It's an old pair, and they nearly fit her again. They no longer fall down past her hips as they did weeks before. Newspapers sit in a thin pile on the coffee table, and she grabs the top few, spreads them out along the baseboards of the dining room, where she will soon paint. She walks back into the living room and turns on a CD. The strains of Modest Mouse float through the rooms.

Peter used to hate the way she painted. “You have to tape,” he'd say, edging past the stacked furniture and paintbrushes, newspapers scattered slapdash on the floor, but she rarely did. She preferred moving the folded newspaper page along with her foot to
catch the dripping paint. His way—the methodical taping, the infuriating papering of the floor—took far too long. By the time he'd finished with the preparation, she was bored with the whole project.

The room is cold with autumn settling in. A chilly fall, they're predicting on TV, but Dana likes the cold. She likes frigid mornings, frost on browning leaves, the scent of firewood up the street, the sky clear and heavy, a wall of blue. She walks across the living room, pirouetting on the Persian rug as Spot paces, looking trapped and dismal on the other side of a closed French door.

Peter hasn't been back to the house for weeks. She knows he will eventually appear to pick up what he's left there, to sort through what few things of his remain—these traces of a husband he no longer is. She knows he'll choose a random, problematic time, sliding his key into the front door and slinking inside. He's no longer welcome here. She doesn't miss him. If in the cold of late night the bed seems large and empty with only Dana there—if she wishes there were someone else beside her, it isn't Peter. The Poet sometimes or, most recently and most recurrently, Jack Moss. But if waking in the night she sighs and runs her hand along the pillows, shivering in the sudden drape of fall, it is never Peter she imagines there.

It was like a movie, Dana would say later, when she was able to talk about it all, when the turning of a doorknob, or the sound of footsteps on the porch, or seeing scraps of white paper didn't send a shiver up her spine. The story that spilled out across the front page of the paper and dominated every news spot on TV had everything from pathos to pathology. Colorful and large, the cast of characters floated nightly into Jersey living rooms—the gorgeous yet tragically unhinged young first assistant prosecutor banging her head against the window of a cop car; the tiny, fragile foreign-language teacher dead in her foyer; the married lawyer who manipulated both women at the expense of his poor, demented
wife, whose suicide attempt, the papers raged, was a matter of public record, the amazing fact she'd not ended up at the bottom of the Hudson nothing more than fate. “
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES” MEETS “LAW & ORDER
,” one of the headlines read.

The story broke right after Dana's lunch at E.Claire's, right after her encounter with the woman shown handcuffed at her arraignment with a bandage peeking out beneath her bangs. Jamie was home for a long weekend when it all rolled out on the eleven-o'clock news, and he'd reached for the remote to mute the newscast, to shield his mother as the particulars of her husband's life unfolded in vivid color on Peter's wide-screen TV.

“It's okay,” she told him, sighing. “I already know,” and she had known some of it, thanks to Moss. She knew the highlights if not the particulars—if not the whys, at least she knew the whos and whens and wheres of things.

Jamie wasn't surprised either as he gazed at the TV and texted his new girlfriend. Peter, who had told his own wife nothing, had at least had the decency to drive to Jamie's dorm in Boston, where he'd warned his son of the unfortunate link to the highly publicized murder—Peter's slight, he said, almost tangential involvement. What Jamie would soon see on the news and what would sadly and ineptly be unrolled for the general public was mostly hype, he'd told his son. The newshounds rarely got things right.

Dana threw out every stick of furniture she'd found with Celia in their yard-sale days—a small desk, an antique phone stand, and three barstools. She promised herself she wouldn't go to Celia's funeral—a promise she broke in the end, but only when a TV camera panned in on the Episcopalian church downtown and after she'd let three of Moss's phone calls go to voice mail. Only then did Dana change her mind, slipping into a black skirt, a lackluster beige blouse, and the high, black, strappy sandals that Celia would have loved. She headed for the church with the cool of early fall blowing through the open windows and Rachmaninoff blaring
from the car radio. Ducking past the cameramen outside, she slid into a pew at the very back of the church, where she listened to a barrage of eulogies and tributes to a woman Dana realized she had never really known.

Ronald was true to his word. He never moved back to Ashby Lane. The house is on the market now. The lawn is neatly mowed, if brown, and what flowers remain are trimmed and tidily deadheaded, the shutters newly painted a pale, insipid blue. She hasn't seen Ronald since the funeral, when they walked together to their cars, his wife's ashes in a lovely silver urn, his fingers trembling on the intricate design around its top. Sometimes Dana is troubled by a thought. A memory, she thinks, but she isn't sure. Considering her state of mind when Celia died, the sangria blur the day became, nothing from that afternoon is certain. Still, sometimes she can almost feel the hood of Ronald's car when, sliding into their driveway, she caught herself by throwing her hands against it. She can almost feel its warmth—tepid, really. The warmth of a hot engine cooled down over time.

She opens the paint, spills the pale gold liquid into a roller pan. With her toes she slides a slice of newspaper under the white trim along the baseboard and rolls the new paint across the dingy, mushroom-colored wall.

She steps back, examining the color. The rain pounds down outside, the windows fill with gray, and the sky is the color of dust. She rolls the paint in long zigs and zags, filling in the spaces between. Beside the window the wall is warm and bright in the lamplight. Dana paints and sings and knows, if only for that one hour, that one moment, she has found the balance that Dr. Ghea spoke of, the small, thin place between darkness and light.

Someone knocks at the door, and Dana navigates her way around the displaced chairs and corner cupboards, through the dishes from her mother's family, dusty and archaic, stacked on the dining-room table, the Spode and Haviland she's almost never
used. “Coming,” she calls out, and she stops to turn the music down.

It isn't Peter. It can't be Peter—he would use his key. He'd slip in. He'd catch her there, shifting the sports page under her bare toes, her feet already speckled with gold paint. He'd stand there in the entryway, his arms crossed over his chest. “Dana!” he'd say. “You're doing it again. All wrong. All wrong. As always.” Or he'd slink back to the bedroom to lie across their bed in the darkened alcove by the dresser. He would lie in wait. He'd scare her, lurking like a shadow in the murk of the rainy day. “Oh,” he'd say. “Didn't mean to startle you, but it is still my house, after all. Where else
would
I be?”

She takes a breath and tugs on the front door, and Jack Moss stands on the slick, rain-splattered porch, his sneakers at the edges of the doormat, his trench coat open and flapping in the wind. Raindrops roll down the visor of his Mets cap and fly into the air.

“Moss?”

“Hi.” He grins.

“Come in.”

She steps back from the door in the tiny entry with the Japanese umbrella stand, the dark red flowered rug, and he stands dripping in the doorway. Water plops in circles and rolls along the floor.

“Here,” she says. “Let me take your coat.”

“Sorry.” He hands it to her. He glances at the wet floor, the spots of rain across the flowered rug.

“It's fine.” She gestures toward the dining room, the painted wall, the scattered bits of newsprint. “What do you think?”

“I like it,” he says. “It's cheery.” He steps to the edge of the living room.

“Sit,” she says. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“No,” he says. “No. I'm just here for a minute.”

“Listen.” She smiles, sits beside him on the sofa. “If you've come to arrest me, Moss, this is a really bad time.”

“Oh, yeah? How come?”

“The painting, obviously. I'm afraid you'll have to come back later.”

“When?” He seems almost serious. He laughs then, like he's caught himself. “There's never a really good time for arrests.”

“Some times are better than others. On the way to E.Claire's might not be a bad one.”

“Or in the dentist's office. Seriously.” He makes a move to stand, slides forward on the sofa.

“Seriously.”

“There's this job at the forensics lab.”

“Huh.”

“Would you be interested?”

“I don't know.” She cups her chin in her hand. “Should I be?”

He shrugs. “I could take you over there. Show you around.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”

“Next week? Tuesday, say?”

“Sounds good.”

“Maybe lunch afterward?”

“Hmmm.” She taps her fingers against her knees. “That depends.”

“Yeah? On what?”

“Where? E.Claire's?”

“Where else?”

“Anywhere in the world else. Anywhere in the
universe
else!”

“No kidding?”

“Nope. I'm out of Xanax.”

“I'll see what I can come up with,” Jack says. He gets to his feet. “Want some help?”

“What? Painting?”

”Yeah. I could tape off the trim before you—”

“Naw,” she says, “but thanks anyway. I've got this system.”

“Right. My ex used to . . . both of them used to . . .” He stops, takes a breath, sticks on his cap. “How are you doing these days?”

Dana looks down at her hands. She looks at Spot, darting back and forth behind the door. “I'm okay,” she says. “I take it one day at a time. This is a good day.”

He nods. “You deserve a whole long string of good days.”

They walk together to the door, their bodies touching briefly in the narrow entryway and moving apart. “Next time you can say hey to Spot,” she says.

“Nice cat.”

“Not really, but he grows on you.”

“Yeah.” He waves toward the frantic kitten as it leaps onto the back of a rattan chair. “At least he isn't boring,” Jack says, and he pushes against the screen door.

“We don't really do boring around here.” Dana laughs. The rain has slowed to a steady drizzle, and she knows it's ushering in more cold. She stands in the doorway, her arms across her chest, as Jack hurries to the Crown Vic in the driveway. She waves as he backs out, as he tips his rain-soaked cap, as a little rivulet of water pours into his lap, as he yells, “Damn!” and pulls the rest of the way out to the street.

She breathes in the fresh air. The day is colder already. She leans her head back, staring at the gray-fog sky, the dazzling autumn trees. The wind blows through, making a long, sweet sound in the air, catching in the spaces between things, garages and skinny side yards and fallen, rolling garbage cans. It pulls her hair back off her forehead, slapping her bandanna from side to side. She breathes again and closes her eyes, and the wind is in every pore, on every inch of skin, but it does not consume her. When it passes, she still stands whole on her front porch, her hands reaching out behind her for the door, her feet dappled in gold.