Four Wives (17 page)

“S
o
I W
OULD HAVE
the children for dinners during the week, then longer stretches on the weekends?” Craig Hewett was trying to get it all straight in his head.

“Yes. That’s usually how it works,” Marie answered her client.

“And I would live in an apartment, maybe in Cliffton?”

“We’d have to crunch the numbers. We could require your wife to move as well, to a smaller house. Obviously, maintaining two households is more costly than one.”

Hewett took a long moment to reflect, and Marie knew what was coming, if not now, then soon, as those secret thoughts played out over the next several days.
JVho will clean, who will shop, who will cook for me? And what will I do when I have the kids? Will the nanny come with them? But where would she stay?
It was cynical to make this assumption, that her client would be worried about such trivial details in the face of such a monumental decision. But it was not unfounded. For most of his adult life, and probably all of his childhood, Craig Hewett had been taken care of by a woman. The mundane yet necessary tasks of sustaining a household, of keeping life running on time, had never been on his to-do list, and this would surely be a factor in his decision. And what was ironic to Marie, what was so maddening, was her conviction that his reliance on his wife as a servant was the very thing that was killing their relationship.

Marie covered the broad strokes of the divorce process, the filing of the petition, the mandatory court hearing, and the different roads it could wind down. If everyone was rational, if they stayed calm and focused on the end result, it could be kept under the radar, settled amicably and wrapped up within the year. If, at the other extreme, one of them wanted to cause trouble, the court would be more than happy to stick its nose in every aspect of their lives. The Hewetts could spend their lives being scrutinized by judges and court shrinks, overworked and obstinate bureaucrats who could not possibly know what was best for them, but would insinuate themselves into every aspect of the separation. They could be at it for years, then find themselves with a similar result’only significantly poorer and emotionally spent. In short, it would behoove Mr. Hewett to be nice.

“I’ll be in touch when I’ve figured out what I want to do,” Hewett said, ready to leave.

Marie stopped him. “Look, I want you to go home and think about this. Think about whether or not you can get through the next few years. When the kids are in school, and your wife has more time for herself, she may have more to give you as well.”

Sitting back now, Mr. Hewett exhaled for what felt like hours. Then he nodded with resolution. “And what if she doesn’t? What if we can’t ever be happy again?”

“That’s the gamble,” Marie said. Then she paused. “Look’we only get one shot at a unified family. You might remarry, have more kids. People make it work. But what you have now’two natural parents together with their children’this is it. You can’t recreate this or get it back, and there are always consequences when it breaks apart.” The words came out from a place deep within her, the same place that had spoken to her every day and every night since her husband began his vanishing act.

Paul Hewett nodded, and Marie could tell he had considered this and weighed it against his own happiness.

Marie sighed. This was, surely, the beginning of the end for the Hewetts. His mind had started down the path. He now had the knowledge that would occupy his thoughts at every possible moment, and those thoughts would, by necessity, be held in secret as he moved farther away from his wife, and their family. He would, instead, begin to ponder his new life. Sitting at the dinner table’flanked by his children as his wife cooked and served, prodding the littlest one to eat her vegetables, then puttered and cleaned up to avoid sitting in front of a plate of food herself’food that she might actually consume and then regret the next day when she squeezed herself into her size 2 AG jeans’Paul Hewett would be thinking about how bad it would be. Marie could see the wheels turning already.

“Just please’think carefully.”

Marie watched him leave, knowing he would be back by the end of the month. Then she turned to Randy, who had been silently observing the consult from across the table.

“Ugghh,” she said, sitting back down in a defeated posture.

Randy looked at her slumped down in the chair. “Did I miss something?”

“No. It’s just that I know his wife.”

“And she’ll be crushed?”

“Yes,” Marie answered, then lifted her head so she could see her young protege. “And no. She’s the perfect Stepford wife. That’s why this will crush her.”

Randy laughed at her depiction. “How does one detect a robot wife from the flesh and blood variety?”

“Easy. The human form does the housewife detail but bitches about it to her friends. She goes out in gnarly sweats without a shower, has dust under her bed, chronic exhaustion, and secretly longs to be Angelina Jolie.” Marie smiled with endearment as she thought about Love, herself, and the small handful of friends she had collected over the years.

“Hell,
I
long to be Angelina Jolie,” Randy said, now thoroughly amused.

“Yeah, right.”

“OK. Maybe not. But Mrs. Hewett?”

Marie scowled. She had nothing against the woman’except the fact that she was one of the coveted. “Where to start? She has a perfect body, which she parades through town in tight black pilates pants. She lunches with friends but orders nothing but green tea, doesn’t drink or smoke, is always nicely dressed, and keeps an immaculate home. Her children are brilliant, uninterested in television, and eat broccoli. She adores her husband, never says no, and never’ever’speaks poorly of him. But the worst part about her is that she pretends all of this is easy, and completely fulfilling. She pretends that it doesn’t faze her to never sleep, or eat, or have an intellectual conversation.”

“Sounds like the Housewife Olympics.”

Marie nodded and smiled. “Exactly! Her purpose in life is to make other women feel like shit for not being her.”

“Until her husband bails,” Randy noted, his eyebrows raised.

“Ahhh’you have no idea! Divorce means immediate disqualification. Like bikers on steroids.”

Randy sat back and folded his arms, his face lit up by the energy force field Marie’s diatribe had generated. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

“Well, it
is
my life, after all.”

“So what is a double H like yourself doing in a place like this?” Randy asked, referring to her two Harvard degrees. “There must be something good out here. Something that made you come.”

Marie rubbed the side of her face, as if trying to remember. She knew the answer’the one she told herself these days. But the real reason? She was almost too embarrassed to say it out loud.

“The grass.”

“Grass?”

“Haven’t you noticed it? The lush, vibrantly green grass? I had this idea that it would bring us serenity. Back to nature and all of that. I wanted my kids to walk outside in their bare feet and feel the ground.”

“That seems like a good reason.”

“Only they don’t do that. My girls prefer to flaunt their designer sandals at the mall. Don’t know where I went wrong, but now, I swear to you’I think if I don’t keep one step ahead of this place, it might actually catch up with me.”

“And the robot Marie Passeti will kill you and take over your life,” Randy teased her, an ominous expression taking shape around his eyes.

Marie smiled then dropped her head to the table, her dark hair spreading out around her face. “Sometimes I wish she would just hurry up and do it.”

Randy was smiling when he reached out his hand. Marie felt her heart jump into her throat as he shifted her misplaced hair with one finger, careful not to touch her cheek with the others.

“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”

He laughed when he said it, and Marie smiled in spite of herself as she lifted her head from the table. He was looking at her now, laughing and smiling in a way that made her believe she was actually making sense. There was a time when this would not have reached so deeply inside her, when she carried within her enough clarity to support her own convictions.

Anthony had’once upon a time’looked at her that way. He used to laugh with her about the ladies with their tight butts and lunches without food. When had he stopped? It was too far back to even remember.

Shit.
Love’s words popped into Marie’s head.
You’re flirting with your help.
More words followed.
Unprofessional. Unseemly. Pathetic.

“So where are we on Farrell?” The shift was abrupt, but necessary. There was simply no time to find a clever segue. Still, it only served to underscore the direction in which her feelings were going, and an awkward tension swept through the room.

Randy pulled back into his chair, then scrambled through a stack of notepads. He pulled one out and began to sum up his findings on the Farrell document production, his eyes consciously avoiding Marie. “We have three years of checks from the joint account.”

“Anything pop out?” Marie asked, pulling up a chair next to his.

“Hard to say. Lots of doctors.”

“Not unusual with kids, believe me.”

Randy checked his notes. “Most are ten, fifteen dollars. Insurance co-pays. But they did pay one doctor anywhere from six hundred to two thousand a month.”

Her eyes lit up now, Marie felt the familiar surge of excitement at the puzzle taking shape. “For how many months?”

“Looks like they start two years ago. There’s a sharp increase just after Simone’s death. Then they stop after the move.”

Looking up from his notes, Randy met Marie’s eyes, and they both nodded. Without a word, Randy got up from the table and walked back into the office to his desk. Marie was right behind him.

They logged onto the Internet, then entered the name Dr. Keller as it had appeared in the Farrells’ check register. Narrowing the field to the Boston area, they found psychiatrist Rachel Keller in Newton, Mass.

“A shrink,” Marie said out loud, as they read the doctor’s resume. “They’re usually not covered.”

“The Farrells were paying out-of-pocket.” Randy chimed in.

“They were paying a lot. And it started
before
the accident.”

Watching the screen intently, Marie thought about what this meant. Farrell had lied about things being fine before the accident. But they already knew that from the police report. His wife’s lawyer had handed over the check registers without the slightest protest. That in itself was not surprising. It always helped the case for alimony to prove expenses, to back them up with hard data. But it also meant that Connely had nothing to fear from disclosing the payments to Dr. Keller’or that he didn’t know any better.

“Marriage counseling?” Randy asked, pulling Marie back from her thoughts.

“Could be,” she said, nodding. “Could be Carson. I doubt it’s the wife. Connely never would have given us those records.”

“What about the kids?”

Marie shrugged, stepping back from Randy’s desk. It could be any one of them.

“So what now? Can we contact the shrink?”

Marie shook her head. “No. Not without a release from Carson.”

“Why don’t we just ask him?”

That was the question of the hour. Asking Carson was the obvious thing to do, the course most lawyers would take under the circumstances. But this case, and Carson Farrell, had bothered Marie from the moment he walked through her door.

Randy was watching her now, the way he always did when she was lost in her thoughts. He waited for her expression to change from contemplation to resolve. When she finally spoke, he seemed pleased with himself that he had anticipated her response.

“Let’s keep it under the radar. Where are you with the neighbors?”

“I have general profiles going four doors out in both directions, both sides of the street.”

“Any with kids of similar ages?”

“Just one.”

Marie shrugged. “Then that’s who will know.”