Monday's Lie (20 page)

Was it a problem with midlife on the near horizon? Or was it more commentary on
our
life, right now and all around us? The math seemed simple enough: Patrick wanted to look like a good guy to these people. But I couldn't quite make it all add up to his wanting to
be
a good guy, not to me at least. At home he was prickly when he wasn't distant.

“What's going on, Pat?” I slid my shoes off and faced him from the closet doorway. He looked as wrecked as I felt, with all the flint out of his spine, sitting there on the corner of the bed hunched over, scrubbing his brows with his fingertips as if he could work enough energy in through his skull to get over the last hurdle of brushing his teeth.

I was simply too tired to take the long way around the block to start the conversation I'd been dreading. He had gnashed and thrashed all through the night before, even more than had become his usual, and yet we'd still gone bowling with his boss and her husband, exhausted as we were.

“What?” he answered.

“I'm trying to see all of this—the bowling tonight, all the dinners and these get-togethers—I'm trying to see it in a good light, but I'm just not feeling it.”

“Seeing what? Feeling what? It's late. I don't want to play twenty questions, Dee. What's the problem?”

I stepped up to the suspicion that had been tethered to the center of my thoughts for days, then I let it off the leash. “Are you getting ready to leave me?”

“What?” He launched from the bed and went from zero to shouting in two seconds. “Are you kidding me?”

“I'm not trying to make you angry.”

“This is
not
trying to make me angry
? What would trying look like, huh? I'd love to know what crazy shit you would say if you were actually trying to make me angry.”

“Stop yelling. I just want to understand what's going on. You're not eating. You're not sleeping. We're going out four times a week, at least, so that we can what? It's like a circus around here. Something's obviously on your mind.”

Patrick ground his teeth and took in a deep breath through flared nostrils. Whether he'd blow out the candles on his temper or breathe fire, I could only wait and see.

He came through his showy sigh in the hard, brittle mode of forced patience. “Are you actually concerned, Dee, or are you just looking for the exits? Let's just go ahead and get it out there in the open, because I'm being accused—”

“Pat, I'm just asking, not accusing. You're not yourself lately—”

“And what do you think ‘myself' should act like for you to be able to recognize me? I'll be honest, Dee, you might not have seen this me before, but that's because it would have been kind of hard to predict what I would turn out to be when I got left holding the bag on our marriage.”

“This is nuts. I'm trying, you know. I don't know what to say to you anymore. You're so goddamned touchy—”

“I'm touchy?” He laughed without a shred of humor in his voice. “Come on, you're setting me up. You have to be. Poor, mistreated Dee. Is that going to be the angle? Is that what you're telling your friends? That I'm touchy and mean? That you think I'm going to leave you, even though you're a perfect angel? You've got some big balls, lady, after what you pul—”

“Enough!” I rarely raised my voice and it slammed a full stop between us. “Enough! I'm not listening to one more roll call of your disappointments. I'm not sitting here while you tell me—again—how lousy it was for me to take birth control pills without telling you. You don't get to run me over with that anymore, not without it coming back on you, you don't.” I paced, sock-footed on our bedroom carpet, rolling up the cage on the storefront of my knowledge about our marriage.
Careful, Plucky,
I heard my mother in my mind. And I ignored her. “You fucking hypocrite!
I
have big balls? You're amazing.

“Tell me, Pat, have you got anything you'd like to ‘get out in the open' with everyone? Maybe tap your glass and make a big reveal about why you're so psychotically cheerful in public and a growling son of a bitch at home? Anything
you
'd like to get off your chest instead of playing charades with your coworkers? Pat, the good guy. Pat, the devoted husband. Pat, the
family
man . . .”

“What are you talking about, Dee?”

“You must think I'm really stupid.”

Patrick scowled and took one slow word at a time “What—are—you—talking—about?”

In which our hero takes a stick to a hornet's nest,
my mother would say when Simon or I were about to go too far in an argument. I pulled the punch on my mother's oft-given warning. I looked at Pat's face. The anger there didn't surprise me, but the electric aura of fear around him snagged me off the trigger. My shoulders sank. “We need to see somebody; talk to a professional or something. We're falling apart.”

“I think you said it all at ‘enough.' ” Patrick snatched the pillow from his side of the bed and pounded down the hall to the living-room sofa.

•  •  •

I didn't read anything into our not speaking. I wouldn't have known what to say to him anyway. But the silence left a clinging weight to the quiet days as they dragged on. The dread of the silent house jousted with the dread of picking up the fight where we'd left off it. It hurt.

But if time heals all wounds, then distraction heals the insult of time's sluggish pace. And nothing is quite so distracting as finding your belongings rifled through. Again.

When Simon was seven years old, his best friend told him that Santa Claus wasn't real and that it was only our mother hiding all the presents, every year, somewhere in the house, until she, not Saint Nick, put them under the tree on Christmas Eve. Simon checked with me and I didn't deny it.

He accepted the challenge and deployed his second-grade sleuth. He soon dragged me to his prize find and we squealed out our discoveries as we nudged each package aside for the next one. When the stack ended at the back corner of our mother's closet, we retraced our burrowing, tidying everything as we went, all the way to the screen of boxed books and folded blankets that she had set up to hide it all.

In the days that followed up to Christmas, the galloping anticipation we normally rode dragged its hooves a bit. The fever of counting down the days only simmered on low with no danger, for the first time ever, of boiling over. Even Simon realized our mistake, and we agreed without having to speak of it that we'd never spoil a surprise again. Lesson learned, we welled in maturity and contrition—safe and undiscovered. And on the bright side, after all, there were still presents to look forward to, even if the big reveal would be a bit of a song and dance on our parts.

Only on Christmas morning, the scant flat packages arranged around the tree didn't match up with the bulging mountain that would have held all the goodies we'd found in the closet. Simon fought tears as he unwrapped puzzle books and Val-U packs of underwear. My cheeks bloomed red as Burl Ives sang “Holly Jolly” and my mother watched me, over the rim of her coffee cup, open a box of assorted teas.

“Would you guys like a tip for all future snooping missions?” she asked.

We nodded at the carpet, unable to meet her eyes.

“There are two things you can't leave disturbed when you go through people's stuff: the stuff and your face. So, if you ever again get the urge to poke around in closets and whatnots that are not yours, I would suggest a big deep breath and a good, hard think beforehand. If you look, you're going to find, and once you find, you can't unfind, so you'd better have your face well in order.”

We did get our presents later in the day, but Mother drove home the point by moving things in our rooms, just an inch or two out of place, so that we could see how clumsy our attempt at slyness had been. Spot-the-difference became a new favorite game for points, and my brother and I got wicked good at it.

•  •  •

Whoever had been in my house was more careful than Patrick would have needed to be. That everything was so close to the order I'd left it in spoke to stealth, and the air still fluttered in the fading wake of someone else's path through the halls.
Forgive us our trespasses.
Right. Will do. As soon as I figured out who needed forgiveness for what, I'd get right on it. The light sting of chills surged over me as I walked the rooms, playing the game for no points this time. Or maybe for all the points if the person turned out to be still lurking somewhere inside. I grabbed one of Patrick's golf clubs from the front closet.

I held my breath and cocked an ear for any sounds that didn't fit. The attic fan whirred its sigh through the vents. An airplane grumbled overhead. It didn't
feel
as if I had company. Whatever that meant. I made my rounds, rolling my feet to tread as quietly as I knew how, my palms sweating into the little divots in the rubber grip on the putter, ears ringing, straining for any indication that I wasn't alone, and having no idea what I would do if I found out that I wasn't.

The stack of bills on my desk was only a shade to the left of where it should have been, and my prescription eyedrops were in the back part of the front bin in the drawer, instead of in the front part of the next bin where
my
hand would automatically have set it. Amid a few more scattered incongruities, nothing appeared to be missing.

I even looked in the pantry and pushed every door that stood angled open in its jamb, dreading that each would stop against a firm someone behind it. But no one was there.

The three obvious possibilities were that my husband had lost his cool to an attack of rather pointless sneak, or a burglar had come in and not found anything worth taking, or Brian Menary was still poking around. If it was Patrick, the basicness of the search confused me. If it was a burglar, my untouched jewelry and the intact $300 in cash in the desk drawer confused me. If it was Brian, it wasn't all that confusing. Only infuriating.

Since I'd left a message at Hoyle's Pharmacy, I was fairly certain who would be on the line when the display showed
unknown caller
.

There was a smile in Brian's voice. It irritated me that I felt a tug of willingness to be cajoled as he said, “I'll tell you, Dee, I don't know whether to be concerned or flattered. Now that you've met me, you can't seem to stay away from me for very long.”

I smirked in spite of myself. “What were you looking for in my house?”

“We weren't looking for anything. I promise, there was never any video surveillance in your home. I never sent any guys rifling through your stuff either. I respected your mother way too much to take my orders past their minimum, whatever the trouble was between her and Paul. I thought he was being kind of ridiculous about the whole thing anyway.

“I meant it when I said I hadn't looked in the medicine chest. We just needed to know what she said, just in case. That's all. Pain and the narcotics they prescribe for it can be a real problem. It makes the higher-ups paranoid. That's why Paul wanted to have her in an approved facility—to avoid all that. But he also wanted her there to get the nice-guy points for sparing everyone the hassle of the recordings.”

“Huh?”

“That's what I meant about the agency hospitals,” he said, as if my disorientation meant something to him that it didn't mean to me. “It doesn't matter what anyone says in those places. The staff is cleared for just about everything. She wouldn't go, as you well know, so they sent me in, but I kept the taps to the bare minimum. And it was only at the very end, anyway. Even so, I'm sorry. But there was never any video. We weren't watching you.”

“Wait, what?” My outrage caught up with my train of thought and his disparate one. He thought I was asking about when he had been here with my mother three years earlier. “No
video
surveillance. No video? You kept the taps to a minimum? You had audio. You left microphones. You were listening in while my mother was dying.”

“She knew, Dee. What are we even talking about?”

“
I
didn't know! It's my house! And you told her that you were leaving microphones in my house and she was fine with that?”

“We didn't talk about it. We wouldn't have had to. It didn't seem to be a problem at all until that last day. . . . There was nothing to wonder about until she turned up the music.”

“Oh my God. I am so stupid.” I was stunned and then not. She had asked to have the music turned up loud in the last minutes of her life. She asked me twice to dial it up until violins rang off the walls and tore the last of the air she breathed to gilded shreds. I had thought she'd wanted to drown out something—pain, fear, memories. And all that may have been true, but only as a secondary goal. She had been shutting the door on Paul, to die without his supervision, to leave him first of all before she left the rest of us. The last control she had wrested from him had been the volume knob on the stereo, and she'd used my hand to do it. Did she know they would wonder? Did she offer up my privacy to their curiosity on purpose?

“You checking in on me isn't routine at all, is it? You don't keep tabs on every former employee's kids and cousins and goddamned dog walkers. That would be ridiculous. You son of a bitch. You guys have been worried for three years about what she said to me in that last hour as she died.”

“We haven't been worried. The follow-up is exactly like I said it was. It's casual and we just check in from time to time.”

“Well, have you figured it out yet, you asshole?”

“Okay, hang on a minute. Calm down. Figured out what?”

“Do not tell me to calm down. Have you figured out what she said to me? If you wanted to know, you could have probably just guessed. She said what she always said—she said nothing. That last hour was for us. About us. And she hardly said a word at all. She never betrayed her position. As if she ever would. Are you satisfied? Paul had her muzzled perfectly. Even in pain and even loaded to the gills on morphine. Congratulations, Paul! If you're still listening in on my phone calls . . .”