The Silent Wife (11 page)

She picks up the shirt and undergarments and drops the items one by one into a hamper. The trousers she arranges on a hanger in her wardrobe. The shoes go into their original box, which she places back on the shelf with her other shoe boxes. She partially emptied the handbag before she went to dinner, but it still contains a number of items. She opens it, turns it upside down, and dumps its contents onto the bed: ballpoint pen, tiny notebook, assorted receipts, loose change—and the sleeping pills. The pill bottle, one of those clear plastic vials with an oversize twist-off cap, makes the sound of a baby's rattle as it rolls into a slight depression in the duvet. She picks it up and reads the print on the label:
Kovacs, Natasha. Take 1 (one) tablet at bedtime as required.

She's feeling better now. “Almost back to normal” are the words she used to reassure Alison, and they were very nearly true. She's at least regained a sense of being held down by gravity, and the objects around her are keeping their shape. Methodically, finding it soothing, she goes through her nighttime routine: turning down the bed, plumping the pillows, tidying away this and that stray object. She changes out of her dress, removes her makeup, and brushes her hair. By the time she hears Todd's key in the lock, she's sitting on the sofa in her robe and slippers reading a travel magazine. She waits while he scrabbles around in the foyer disposing of his jacket and keys and change. She hears him clear his throat and mutter a word or two under his breath. She even hears his shoes as he approaches, dragging on the pile of the carpet.

“You're still up,” he says.

He comes around the sofa to stand in front of her and kisses the top of her head. She closes her magazine, puts it aside, and gets to her feet. There's something about his posture. He's caught wind of Dean's call and thinks that she may have stayed up to confront him. He places a hand on her shoulder, searching her face.

“Alison was here,” she says. “We ate at Cite and she drove me home. How was your day? What did you get for dinner?”

“I had a burger at the Drake,” he says.

He smells of alcohol and fried food. His nose is shiny and his voice is pitched high. She picks up the magazine she was reading and adds it to the stack on the coffee table. When she turns back he's still standing there looking at her.

“What?” she says.

“Nothing. It's good to see you.”

“You should get the dog walked. I'll wait up for you.”

When he gets back she's in the kitchen using a wooden spoon to stir a pot of Ovaltine. Now he becomes talkative. He wants to tell her about various things that happened at the bar over the course of the evening—a couple making out, really going at it, and a gang of priests getting soused. There was some kind of religious convention at the hotel. He talks about the mishap of the morning—the missing key—and laughs about his bad temper. “Poor guy,” he says, referring to the janitor. “But he was gone so fast. You'd almost think he was waiting for an excuse.”

She puts four slices of bread in the toaster and pushes down the lever. As he talks on, she responds mechanically with nods and murmurs. He doesn't seem to notice that she isn't really listening. When the toast is ready she butters it, spreads it with strawberry jam, and cuts it into triangles. These she arranges on a plate, which she places on the bar top. He pops one of the triangles into his mouth and takes a turn around the room. He comes back, picks up the plate, and continues to pace.

“You didn't talk to Dean today,” he says. “By any chance.”

“Dean,” she says. “Why would I talk to Dean?”

“No reason.”

“I can make more toast,” she says.

“Dean is a bastard,” he says. “I hope you know that.”

He's getting dangerously close to confessing. She's relieved when he moves to the fireplace and turns his attention to the newly framed picture on the mantel.

“This is quite the picture,” he says. “The detail in these things is phenomenal.”

“How do you like the frame?”

“The frame. I didn't even notice it.” He laughs. “Good job. I like it.”

When he comes back with his empty plate, his mug of Ovaltine is waiting for him. It's not too hot and he gulps down half of it in one go.

“I love you, you know,” he says combatively.

She's standing at the sink washing the pot and the wooden spoon. “That's nice,” she replies, looking at him over her shoulder. “How's the Ovaltine?”

“Good.” He puts the mug to his lips and recklessly drains it.

“Give me that.” She holds out her hand.

He comes around the bar top and gives her the mug. As she rinses it under the tap, he presses against her from behind, circling her waist with his arms. “You're too good to me,” he says.

When she wakes up on the sofa it takes her a while to remember why she's here, and then there's a moment of escalating panic. Last night, after getting Todd undressed and sitting him down on the edge of the bed, after giving him a push and watching him collapse backward like so much dead meat, his jaw slack and his eyes already closing, after lifting his legs off the floor and trying without success to roll him into his proper place, she covered him with the duvet and left him there, lying across the mattress on a diagonal.

Eleven pills. That's how many were in the vial, round blue
tablets like buttons on a baby's smock. She spilled them into her hand and counted them out as she dropped them one by one into her mortar. A woman who grinds up sleeping pills in her kitchen mortar and stirs the resulting chalky powder into her husband's bedtime drink could potentially attract a lot of negative attention, could even make a name for herself, but that's not how she was thinking about it at the time. It was more a matter of the just and appropriate thing to do. The pills were in his pocket; he was careless enough to leave them there; it was only right that he should be the one to ingest them. If he ingested the pills they would disappear, and in the process the score between them would be settled.

Unfortunately she failed to notice the dose, and it's now too late to check because the information is gone—the label scraped off and flushed away, the vial itself down the chute with the rest of yesterday's trash. Not that knowing would be any help because she has no idea what dose would be likely to kill him or how much he'd had to drink or what the exponential effect of the alcohol would be. Looking back now she sees that she couldn't have been in her right mind, taking a risk like that without even stopping to think.

She's aware of her fondness for ledger keeping, a term that marriage counsellors use to castigate their clients for keeping a running tally of who did what to whom, which is not in the spirit of generosity that supposedly nurtures a healthy relationship. The way she sees it, generosity is admirable but not always practical. Without some discreet retaliation to balance things
out, a little surreptitious tit for tat to keep the grievances at bay, most relationships—hers included—would surely combust in a blaze of resentment.

The thing is, eleven sleeping pills did not then and do not now strike her as very many. The alcohol could tip him over the edge, but he's a big man who can take a lot of abuse. The most likely outcome, the intended outcome—and let's not forget she has a pharmacist for a father—is that sooner or later he's going to wake up.

Avoiding the bedroom and its en suite bath she makes use of the powder room off the foyer. Still in her bare feet and nightgown she busies herself opening drapes and blinds, folding her blanket, and pounding the sofa cushions till they've decompressed and resumed their natural shape. When she's given the dog his breakfast she sits down at her desk to check her daybook and her e-mail. Bergman has cancelled, leaving only Mary Mary, her first client of the day. It's a bit of good luck as she can't have any fuss while clients are here, and if he's going to get up and stagger around, chances are he won't do it before eleven, by which time Mary Mary will be gone.

When it's no longer possible to avoid the bedroom, she enters like a wary animal, all nose and ears in the lurking gloom. The stagnant air has a sour note that fondles the back of her throat, forcing into her mind the appalling thought that he might have survived the pills and alcohol but choked to death on his vomit. She's heard of that happening. If he's breathing, he's doing it soundlessly. Pausing at the foot of the bed she studies
the swell in the covers, the menacing alpine ridge. As far as she can tell, its shape has not altered since she last looked at it some eight hours ago.

She dresses quickly and in the bathroom brushes her teeth, ties back her hair, and applies her daytime makeup—mascara and a light gloss of pressed powder. Her face in the mirror is incongruous, youthful and pretty to the point of reproach. Passing again through the bedroom she watches and waits for an intimation or portent of the kind of day it's going to be, but receives no sign.

The closet in the foyer yields up a leash for the dog, and there she also finds her Nikes and a windbreaker. She and Freud take the elevator down to the lobby, where she waves to the doorman and greets a neighbour who is coming in as she is going out. It's good to be under the open sky and breathing the fresh, unsullied air. Only now, as it's leaving her, does she notice the constraint she's been under, creeping around like a felon in her own home. At least there's been no recurrence of last night's sickness or vertigo or whatever it was. That was a new one on her and something she really didn't care for.

She follows her usual morning route, walking the shoreline to the pier and then cutting back through Gateway Park. The sky is grey and the lake a dull bottle green, but the bracing air and her pumping legs give her some new life. When she's back inside with her takeout latte, she cautiously opens the bedroom door and without crossing the threshold peers intently into the gloom. As far as she can tell, nothing has changed.

Mary Mary is a twelve-year-old girl whose parents send her to Jodi because she's wayward and rebellious. She loves her therapy sessions, which get her out of school and make her feel special, but makes a point of being pushy and intrusive. The child has boundary issues. If there's trouble with Todd, Mary Mary is sure to put her nose in it. Jodi counts herself lucky when Todd stays put and the girl comes and goes without any hitches.

Standing on the balcony to cool her head, she takes stock of her situation. While she was in with Mary Mary, Todd's phone was sounding from its place on his dresser behind the closed door of the bedroom, where she left it last night when she was emptying his pockets as she helped him get undressed. Todd keeps his phone in vibrating mode, and throbbing on the wood surface it sounded like there were workmen in there with electric hammer drills. Loud enough to wake him, she would have thought, especially given that Todd is so keenly attuned to his phone. His phone going off, to him, is like a crying baby to its mother, calling for immediate, tender attention. And he isn't the type to ignore it, roll over, and go back to sleep. Todd is someone who springs out of bed the second he opens his eyes.

She watches a pair of gulls swooping and diving out on the lake. Far from hesitating or prevaricating, when they spot what they want below the water's surface they attack at high speed, headlong and brash. Their raucous calls—a gullish version of chuckling and gloating—don't seem to warn off their prey, who are swallowed whole before they know what hit them.

She's tempted now to push on with her day as if there were nothing out of the ordinary going on. Turning a blind eye is
something she knows how to do. She's adept at leaving well enough alone, waiting to see what happens. It's time for her workout, and after that she would normally have lunch. She's been looking forward to the small fillet she has thawing in the fridge. But when Todd wakes up he's going to be asking questions. “Why did you let me sleep so late? Didn't you think that something might be wrong?” And in the event that he doesn't wake up the questions will come from elsewhere. The paramedics. The police. She should make up her mind what she's going to say if she's put on the spot—what her story will be, how she can account for her behaviour, the fact that she did nothing, nothing at all, when her loved one failed to get out of bed in the morning. She can just hear some enterprising policeman saying to her: Mrs. Gilbert, your husband was dead for six hours—or eight hours or twelve hours—before you called 911. And on it would go from there. Didn't you think you should at least look in on him? Didn't you realize? Didn't it occur to you? Didn't it just happen to enter your mind? That your husband might be sick. That he might be in distress. That he might be unconscious. That he might be
dead
, Mrs. Gilbert.

Unconscious, she thinks. He could be unconscious. And on the heels of that thought comes another more ominous one—the thought that he could be in a coma, a possibility that has somehow eluded her up to this moment. Like a winking intruder the term
brain damage
slides into her mental landscape and with it a vision of Todd as a human vegetable, failing to either live or die, belonging to no one, not even himself, but calling the shots nonetheless as people scurry about to feed him, bathe him, massage
him, sit him up, and lie him down as days and nights become months and years and his loyalties, along with his assets, remain in escrow. And even so there will be questions. She's starting to feel that she is seen and judged, her every move logged to be used against her. It's no comfort that Freud has been nosing the closed bedroom door off and on all morning. Mrs. Gilbert, even your dog knew that something was wrong.