The Wife's Tale (13 page)

Finding the handle on the truck door, Mary climbed inside, assailed by the rich scent of chocolate. She rested her head and
closed her eyes, unable to resist the voices of her parents whispering into her ear.
Well, if he wasn’t having an affair with Frenchie, he must have been having an affair with someone,
Irma would have said. Orin had been fond of Gooch but would be no less pragmatic about his disappearance:
Well, the only thing to do is find him, I guess. Confront him. If you think you can’t let him go. Have you called his mother?

Called his mother? Why would she call his
mother?
Mary didn’t want to alarm Eden if there was nothing to be alarmed about. She was also unprepared to admit to the woman (whom
she had telephoned dutifully at noon Pacific Time the last Sunday of each month for the first ten years of their marriage,
and who had always sounded equally surprised and disappointed—“Oh Mary, it’s
you
”) that she’d been right all along. She couldn’t call Gooch’s mother anyway. The cellular phone was still charging in the
socket at home.

She’d told Gooch, when he’d given her the phone, that she would never remember to bring it with her. She also knew she’d never
figure out how to use it, since she feared the simplest technology, which, like the automated teller, seemed to offer further
opportunity for failure. Every machine, except the cash register at work, was a
gadget
to confound her. For similar reasons, she’d objected when Gooch wanted to get a personal computer “like everyone else in
the free world.” She’d argued that they couldn’t afford it, but she’d also read enough advice columns to worry that the Internet
was a passport to porn and would lead to other unsavory addictions. Gooch had called her a Luddite. She didn’t know what that
meant but she wished she were not one. Then she would have a cellphone, and she could call
someone
.

Legs fast asleep, numb as they often went when she sat too long, she searched through the open sunroof. Still no rain. Slowly,
because her fingers were stiff and cold, she inserted the key into the ignition, enjoying the sharp pins pricking her calves
as blood streamed to her starving muscles.

Setting the truck in reverse, glancing in the mirror to note the concrete light-stand to her rear, she didn’t immediately
pull out of her spot. Gooch’s face before he left for work flashed before her, and the sound of his silky voice asking about
her wardrobe for the anniversary dinner. The genuine way he said it was a hell of a thing to be married for twenty-five years.
How he’d urged her to buy something
nice
. Her right foot heavy on the truck’s brake, riding the rapids of eternal hope, she didn’t notice the approach of the crow.
When the bird dove through the sunroof to claim more of the nutty treasures he and his mates had been stealing while she was
gone, the thief seemed as shocked by her presence as she was by his intrusion.

Mary screamed. The startled bird cawed, flying not back through the open sunroof but straight into the windshield and then,
flapping madly, at Mary, who in batting the bird, released her foot from the brake, inadvertently jamming on the gas, crashing
the rear of the truck into the light-stand. Black. Feathers. Black.

Lifting her head off the scalloped steering wheel, Mary expected to see blood. The bird was gone. The chocolate, she noticed
now, picked and pecked and shredded on the seat beside her—had the birds done that? Or had she? There was an ache in her forehead
but she couldn’t find a contusion, not even the smallest of bumps. She shifted her eyes when a shadow appeared in her periphery.
The teenage boy. She could tell by the look on his face that he’d witnessed the whole thing.

“Fuck!” he breathed, opening the door and reaching over her gut to set the car in park, and to turn the key on the still humming
motor. “Are you okay? That was unbelievable. The bird was like…” He gestured wildly with his arms. “And you were like”—he
batted at the air in caricature—“fuckin’
unbelievable
.”

“I hit my head.”

The boy drew his cellphone like a gun from his pocket. Mary stopped him. “No. I’m okay. How’s the truck?”

He stepped back to survey the damaged Ford. “Built tough.” He grinned.

Mary took a deep breath, feeling her head again. The space between her eyes. It hurt when she pressed down.

“Sure you don’t want me to call an ambulance?”

“I’m sure. I’m sorry.”

He noticed for the first time the mess of Laura Secord strewn about the front seat. “Holy shit!” he said.

“I’m okay.”

Closing the door reluctantly, he remarked, “You don’t
look
okay.”

Sweet androgynous boy. He didn’t know that she never looked okay. She cranked the window down. “Thank you. Really. Sorry.”

The pounding rain, though expected, surprised them both. The boy tugged at his hood and hurried off as Mary turned the key
in the ignition, charged by the sound of the motor and the compliance of the shifting gears. She waved, watching the scrawny
boy resume his crouch in the shelter of the doorway, hoping that his wait wouldn’t be long or, like hers, in vain.

There were no other cars on Leaford’s roads. No birds in Leaford’s trees. No humans with umbrellas on her sidewalks near the
library or the mall. They’d all read the paper. It occurred to Mary, driving through the storm, her windshield wipers droning
heavily, righteous rain battering her scalp, that Gooch might have had an accident. He could have slipped in Chung’s parking
lot on his way to get his Combo Number 5—it
had
been wet last night. He could have fallen and hit his head and lost his memory, or his reason. She scanned the road for her
phantom husband. Like the phantom pain she still felt around the time her period would have come. Like the phantom fat she’d
carried around in senior year, even when she was at her most slender.

Competing with the thunder and lightning, the rain pelted Mary’s face through the sunroof. Furnace repair. Sunroof. Anniversary
dinner. Mother’s new meds. Address issue of twenty-five thousand dollars in the account. Gooch’s whereabouts? Forget the list—cry.
Let it out.
“It’d be good, Mare,” Gooch had often said, “if you could let it out.”

She reached for the detritus of Laura Secord beside her, realizing that she’d eaten little more than chocolate the entire
day and it was already well past noon. Bringing the square to her mouth, she was overcome by nausea and tossed the chocolate
back onto the seat.

The bank was quiet and empty with a lone teller in sight when Mary entered, shaking herself like a wet dog on the rubber mat.
A young woman in a beige suit met her at the desk, frowning. “Nasty out there, hmmm?”

Mary assumed that she meant the world in general, and agreed. As she was virtually a stranger to the bank, the teller studied
her quietly, waiting. “I just need to know the balance on my account,” Mary said.

The woman smiled, taking Mary’s bank card and processing it. She raised a brow when the machine answered her query, and handed
the slip of paper to Mary. Twenty-five thousand dollars more than they had. Mary was afraid to call attention to the error,
in case it wasn’t an error. If Gooch had put that money in the bank, those gains could only have been ill gotten and surely
had something to do with his disappearance.

Arriving home with no recollection of the drive from the bank to her house, Mary parked the truck and waded through the pouring
rain toward the front door, disturbed by the mystery of the money, deciding that Gooch must have lost his mind and robbed
a bank. Or The Greek.

She smelled the dead furnace and felt the sting of cold air from the broken glass at the back door as she moved through the
small living room, where Gooch liked to watch golf and black-and-white movies, and toward the bloodstained hallway. Her eyes
fell upon the kitchen table, where she both feared and hoped to see a note from him.

The refrigerator strummed her pain as she reached for the aspirin in the cupboard above the stove, shaking two, then three
tablets into her palm, wondering resentfully why she and Gooch continued to keep medication
out of reach
when they had no children and never would. She swallowed the tablets with her saliva rather than bothering to run the tap,
shivering when she realized how drenched she was.

She sloshed toward the telephone, wishing they’d bought that answering machine Gooch had suggested in case he’d been calling
all day, in case someone had needed to leave an important message, though the fact that the telephone was not currently ringing
off the hook gave her some perverse satisfaction. After testing for a dial tone, she punched Gooch’s number from the emergency
card. “It’s Mary Gooch. At 3:35 p.m. I’m sorry to be a bother. I’m calling for my husband again. If you could tell Jimmy Gooch
I’m home now. And could he please call me there. Thank you. Sorry.”

If you think you’re not ready to let him go,
her imagined Orin had said. She squeezed down the bloodstained hallway. Her unmade bed beckoned. A rest, she thought. To
sleep. To dream. Regretting her harsh words with the furnace, she settled her weight down and pulled the bloodstained quilt
up to her chin.

T
he ringing telephone drifted inside Mary Gooch’s troubled dreamscape and chased her like a stinging wasp over a barren Leaford
horizon. She woke frightened, groggy, swatting at the receiver. It was Joyce from St. John’s with a reminder that her check
was due, that Irma’s new meds needed a signature, and that the potluck had been changed to Tuesday night. Mary muttered some
polite compliance and hung up the phone, shaking herself awake with dubious recollections—Gooch not home? Sylvie Lafleur not
an evil whore? And had the accident in the parking lot actually happened? The surplus in the bank account? The previous hours
felt like a dream sequence, and just as confounding in life as it would be in a movie.

The telephone rang again and she drew it to her lap, answering, “Yes Joyce,” because Joyce always called back with some forgotten
detail. “Yes. I’ll do the cake for the raffle.”

Where are you, Gooch? And why is there twenty-five thousand dollars in our account? Dialing Gooch’s cellphone number, which
she had quickly learned by heart, she waited for the familiar stranger’s voice. The liquid sky suggested midnight but the
clock read seven-fifteen p.m. She’d slept only a few hours. “It’s Mary Gooch calling. Again. I’m sorry. If you could tell
my husband I’m very worried and would very much appreciate his call. It’s seven-fifteen.”

On occasion, reading a celebrity questionnaire, Mary would attempt to distill her existence as addressed by questions like
Happiest Moment?
and
Greatest Achievement?
Under
Most Used Phrase?
she would answer unhesitatingly, “I’m sorry.” She apologized for the way she ate, with a disturbing lack of discrimination.
Biggest Regret?
—not telling Gooch about the miscarriage on the eve of their wedding.
Greatest Love?
—obvious.
Greatest Extravagance?
—obvious.
Worst Habit?
—obvious. Mary envied drinkers and gamblers, for whom addictions were not necessarily outerwear.
Best Physical Trait?
She’d have to say eyes. On the question
Greatest Adventure?
she had no adventures to describe, great or small. And she had yet to define her life’s goals, so also skipped the question
Proudest Achievement?
She shuddered to think how Gooch would answer the questions, if he dared to do so honestly.

The Kenmore sang down the channel of bloodstained hall and, like the doomed sailor, Mary sought to answer the siren call,
lifting her feet off the bed and swinging them to the carpet with a thud. The refrigerator hummed more loudly, tone pitched
high, but she could not persuade the rest of her freight to couple with her waiting legs. She paused, her wheezy breath drowning
the call from the kitchen. The phone rang and she reached for it, answering, “Yes Joyce.”

There was silence. Breathing. “Gooch?” she blurted. She felt his ear on the other end of the line, the weight of his sadness,
the depth of his love. She thought of the hundreds of things she’d saved up to say, but could not shift one from her brain
to her lips. “Please come home, Gooch,” she finally managed. “Whatever it is, we’ll work it out.”

There was a pause, shallow breathing, and then a familiar voice, feminine and sly. “Mary?”

Wendy. Calling from the restaurant at the lake. “Mary?”

It was Mary’s turn to pause now. She cleared her throat. “We won’t be making it tonight, Wendy. We can’t make it.”

“Can’t
make
it?” Wendy repeated. “It’s
your
anniversary, Mary. We’re all here for
you
. What’s going on with Gooch? Did you two have a fight? Is this serious? I think you owe us an—”

Wendy had a good deal more to say, and was still saying it as Mary hung up. She pictured the six of them gathered at the table
she’d reserved months ago, with a view of the wide, choppy lake. After the initial “Oh my Gods” and “Holy shits” and whatever
other profanities exclaimed the news, she guessed they would decide to stay at the restaurant and go on with the meal. Wendy
would dine on the Gooches misfortune, and bore the others with her bitterness over the time wasted on the anniversary scrapbook.
Pete would wonder why Gooch hadn’t said anything to him, besides asking idly one day, “Are you
happy?
” to which his oldest friend had responded, “Are you
high?
” By dessert Kim would be glaring at François, who’d inherited a wandering eye. No one would be surprised by the fracture
of Jimmy and Mary Gooch. It had only ever been a matter of time.

Mary watched the telephone, wondering if she should call the police. But what would she tell them? Twenty-five thousand dollars
had appeared mysteriously in her account and her husband had not come home. The scenario was incriminating. She exercised
her sporadic belief in God, appealing for a new pre-emptive miracle.
Just please let Gooch come home,
she begged.