The Silent Wife (32 page)

By the time she's ready for bed her mind is made up. In the morning she'll turn herself in. It'll be easy. All she has to do is give the family man a call—she still has his card—and tell him about her arrangement with Alison. Whatever happens after that will be up to the police and the lawyers and the judge and the jury. They will do with her as they see fit. Justice will be in their hands and she will be off the hook, no longer responsible. She conceives this plan in a flurry of inevitability. This is what it's come down to, and she can almost feel glad about it, almost relieved. At least she'll be free of all the doubt and fear.

And in the meantime she can look forward to the family man's reaction. That alone will be worth it, catching him out in all his polished conceit.

But her sleep is fitful and during the night her agitation ignites and spreads. By morning a fire rages in her chest and throat, her head is in the jaws of a vise, and her muscles are in shreds. In spite of the sweat pouring out of her, a chill wind is rippling through her bloodstream. She alternates between huddling under the bedclothes and heaving them aside, until at last she is forced out of bed by the dog's breath on her face and the little yips he gives when he needs attention. With a clammy hand she picks up the phone and cancels her morning clients. She calls the pet sitter, who agrees to come by and take Freud off her hands, and then she calls the dog walker to say that the dog will be staying with the pet sitter. Making the calls exhausts her. When she wakes up again it's dark outside and the dog is gone. She's covered in sweat, tangled in her damp sheets. It's an effort to get to her feet. She makes her way to the bathroom, swallows a sip of water, stands over the toilet bowl, throws up a small amount of bile. Gets back into bed on the other side.

Time passes. She notes that it's light outside and then dark again. She recalls hearing the phone and someone buzzing from the lobby. She wonders if it's the weekend, but that may have come and gone. She moves back to her own side of the bed, which is now dry, and wishes that someone would bring her a glass of ginger ale or an orange Popsicle. That's what her mother used to give her when she was sick in bed as a child, though she was never sick for very long. The girl she used to be was resilient.

Back then, she believed that only good things would happen to her in life. That was the promise, and when Todd came along, he was the proof. Here was a man with dreams and the will to make them real. In the beginning they were so very taken with each other, so confident of their place in the scheme of things. She didn't know then that life has a way of backing you into a corner. You make your choices when you're far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows. You choose a career and other careers are lost to you. You choose a mate and commit to loving no other.

When she dozes she dreams of strangers, unknown men and women telling her things that she can't hear or doesn't understand. She gets up, toasts a piece of bread, butters it, drops it into the garbage disposal, goes back to bed. Now she's in Florida giving a lecture on eating disorders. Someone has died from an overdose of sleeping pills. Alison is pregnant and she, Jodi, is somehow responsible. She trudges through blackness, swims upstream, falls into a pit and struggles to get out. She and Todd are living in their old digs, the little apartment where they were happy when they were first together. She's sorting through an array of household goods, putting items into boxes one by one, but there are too many things and the movers are banging on the door. The scene changes and Todd is saying that he's going to marry Miss Piggy. He hopes she doesn't mind. When she wakes up she feels utterly alone. The taste in her mouth makes her think of mice.

As she suspected all along, there are definitely insects living
in her hair. She tosses her head, but the tiny creatures hang on tight, happy in the splendid nest they've made of her damp locks and greasy scalp. They must love that—the oil and the sweat, the rancid smell of it. A perfect place to lay their scummy eggs and raise their revolting young. A breeding ground beyond compare.

On the fifth day of her illness Klara finds her lying on top of the bedclothes like a blown leaf, curled and weightless. She's on her right side with her head and shoulders turned to the left—thrown back against the bunched duvet—wearing an oversize T-shirt that's twisted around her torso.

Klara stands in the doorway, vacillating between a state of alarm and the thought that her employer has merely had a late night. She's tempted to simply shut the door and get on with the cleaning. The woman has always been pale and thin, a poor specimen in Klara's opinion. But even in the half-light Klara can see that something isn't right. Mrs. Gilbert's skin has a bluish tint, and her sunken eyes are beyond the preserve of even a very bad hangover.

“Mrs. Gilbert? You are feeling okay?”

She steps into the room and stands at the foot of the bed. Something has happened to Mrs. Gilbert's hair. Her long, beautiful hair is gone, chopped off as if by a hatchet. The pitiful mess that remains is plastered in clumps to her scalp. This above all else strikes at Klara's core. She leans over the bed and takes hold of Jodi's wrist.

“Mrs. Gilbert,” she says. “Please. Wake up.”

She gives the wrist a firm shake. The eyes open and a shudder passes through the wraithlike form. Klara lets go and crosses herself. She hurries out of the room to look for the phone.

Later, after the ambulance has come and gone, Klara goes into the bathroom and finds the missing hair—a soft, dark mass mounded on the floor. Flung into a corner are the pinking shears that did the damage.

She's sitting up in bed, resting back against a wedge of pillows. Clear pale daylight pours through the window, heightening every detail of the small room: the laundry mark a black smudge on her turned-back sheet, the soft weave of her blue blanket, the mint-coloured walls showing patches of discoloration, on her bedside locker the spreading poinsettia, on the window ledge the speckled lilies whose sweet, rotting smell has been invading her dreams.

Her bedpan is gone and so are the IV tubes. Yesterday, before breakfast, she made her first solo trip to the washroom. There she found her toothbrush, hairbrush, and assorted toiletries in a zippered bag beside the sink. She doesn't know who fetched them for her or who brought the plant or the flowers. People have been coming and going all the while. In the beginning she was barely aware of them. She'd wake up and see someone standing by her bed or sitting in the chair in the corner, and then she'd drop off and be gone again.

One of the nurses, the one with the gappy teeth, has just been in to take her temperature and give her a scolding. “You do know, Miss Brett, that when you first came in we thought we
might lose you. Why did you let yourself get so dehydrated? You ought to know that with flu you need to drink plenty of fluids. You should have told someone you were sick. Your friends are all very concerned. Any one of them would have been happy to look in on you, bring you some juice, help you wash your hair.”

It's still a shock to look at herself in the mirror. She has no memory of wielding the shears and no sense of the thoughts that might have been going through her head. What she does recall is the satisfaction she felt at seeing her hair on the floor, knowing it was separate, not a part of her anymore, no longer attached. All her memories from the days of her illness are disjointed like this. But one thing she does know is that a lot of people were trying to get in touch with her. She remembers ringing, buzzing, and knocking, messages and conversations. In particular a conversation with Dr. Ruben—him saying how sorry he was about Todd, how he hated to disturb her at such a time, how he had something to tell her, something that would at least give her one less thing to worry about.

What is it that she doesn't need to worry about? She tries to remember. It's playing at the edge of her mind like the fragment of a tune. And there's Dr. Ruben in her mind's eye in his white coat with his slight stoop, the words coming out of his mouth. “Test results.” That's what he called to tell her. Todd's test results have come back negative. A message from beyond the grave. Todd died a healthy man and left his women uninfected. One less thing to worry about.

Mercifully, the nurse has gone away and left her in peace.

She needs to close her eyes and think about the visit from Harry LeGroot, who came by after lunch to bring her the news.

“So. You're back in the world,” Harry said, sitting on the edge of her bed smelling of the outside world—tobacco, fresh air, damp wool—his face ruddy, his hair a sleek silver pelt. He told her about the call he'd received from Stephanie, who'd been alerted by Klara, who had tried to get in touch with Todd. “As far as Klara knew, Todd was alive and well. I guess she missed the story in the papers, and apparently you didn't get around to filling her in.” He found this odd, judging from the way he was looking at her, but he didn't prod her any further. Nor did he ask about her hair. The main reason for his visit, he said, was to tell her that the gunmen had been found.

“The gunmen,” he repeated, responding to her blank stare. “The perps. There are two of them. They're being held pending their bail hearing.”

She didn't like the way he was speaking to her—patiently, carefully, telling her this in the gentlest possible way. It could only mean that the men had talked, that all the dots had been connected.

“They corroborated what we already knew,” Harry said.

“That Dean Kovacs hired them and paid them to do this thing.”

What was he saying? And why was he smiling? He appeared to be enjoying her confusion. Maybe he wanted to trick her into confessing. Of course. That's why he'd come to the hospital when he could have waited a day or two and seen her at his office. Catch her out while she was still drugged and disoriented. But she'd been planning to confess—that had been her intention
all along—and she would have done so already if not for her illness. He didn't have to trick her to get at the truth.

But Harry was on a roll now, warming to his subject, speaking with gusto as he told her that the men were local hoods with rap sheets as long as her arm who had identified Dean as the one who had hired them, but that nobody needed to take their word for it because there was plenty of evidence to back them up.

“Phone calls. Bank transactions. Kovacs was a fool. He left a paper trail a mile long.”

Harry went on to say that they were stubbornly pleading their innocence, these two saps, maintaining loudly and energetically that they hadn't followed through. Had they been hired by Dean to do the job? Yes. Had they actually done it? No. When he told her this he laughed and slapped his knee. It never failed to amuse him, he said, the lies that criminals would tell in their desperation to clear themselves. Even when they'd been caught red-handed they'd say anything, absolutely anything.

As she regains her physical strength, her mental acuity also makes a comeback. At first she has no idea how to think about it, the reprieve that she's been granted, the technicality that has given her back her life. Technicality is the word for it, too. She is not one to attribute things like this to a higher power looking out for her. She doesn't disbelieve in God, but there's no reason to think that God would intervene on her behalf and not on Dean's. If God were the judge he would have to find them equally guilty.

She remembers now her phone conversations with Dean.

All that rage and fury. She thought nothing of it at the time. It seemed to her that he merely wanted to vent. He was Todd's oldest friend after all—how could she take him seriously? As it turns out, however, there are depths to Dean that she never fathomed. Clearly, she underrated him. But then, as someone who has no children, she must be forgiven for overlooking the parental imperative, the compulsion to safeguard one's offspring at whatever cost. And not being a man, she can never fully grasp the kind of macho posturing that Dean was engaged in, which no doubt played a part in leading him astray, in prompting him to carry things too far.

She inclines toward the view that Dean's men really are the culprits, that their plea of innocence amounts to just what Harry says—a desperate attempt to clear themselves. And what does that say about Alison? It could be that Alison was not to be trusted, had no intention of honouring their deal. Or maybe she just caved in at the sight of all that money. It's also possible that Alison did pay Renny and that Renny was the shirker. On the other hand, Alison and Renny may have both followed through and done what they were paid to do. Or they may at least have meant to follow through. Jodi would prefer to think the best of them. She is not inclined to doubt either Alison's sincerity or Renny's zeal for his work. Still, all she can do is speculate, because the truth will never be known, and besides, in a case like this the truth is relative, complex, tainted. The only thing she knows for sure, the one thing she can count on, is that she won't be getting a refund. If she wants to know why Alison is avoiding her, well, that may be her answer.