The Wife's Tale (36 page)

“I’ll be at the hospital until late anyway. I just can’t bear the thought of sleeping in an empty house.”

Having forced some toast and strawberries on both herself and her mother-in-law, Mary set off to check out of the hotel. She
could not imagine, climbing the hill to the Highlands, where her strength was coming from, and wondered what sway the prayer
circle had with their maker.

The roller coaster again. Oscillating, vacillating, careening between hope and despair. As the traffic droned by, she saw
Gooch behind the wheel of each passing car. Gooch should be here. His mother needed him. His wife needed him. She closed her
eyes and sent a plea on the wind.
Jack is dying, Gooch. Please, come here.

Thinking of her shrunken father-in-law in his wheelchair, she remembered that Gooch had seen Jack too, and must have known
how close the man was to the end. Gooch hadn’t even left a number to call him in case Jack died.
Damn you, Gooch,
she thought suddenly. Damn you all to hell. She remembered a word he’d written in the letter he sent to her. Coward.
Yes.

Walking the street in the precocious dust, she remembered that she’d meant to stop at the plaza to call a taxi. Now it was
too late. Too tired to go forward. Too far to go back. The streets were clogged with traffic but there were few people on
the sidewalks. When she heard footsteps behind her, she clutched her sporty blue tote bag to her chest. The footsteps drew
closer. She wished she had a can of Mace like the ones she’d seen on television, in case the only mugger in Golden Hills was
coming after her.

A teenage boy ran past her in a blur of testosterone, meeting a teenage girl stepping out from the shelter of the trees. They
embraced—roaming hands, hungry mouths—under each other’s spell. She thought of herself with Gooch in those early days. They
had been such wanton lovers.

Mary hadn’t noticed that the girl was wearing earphones until she tugged out one of the pods and stuffed it into the boy’s
ear. He wrapped his arms around her waist and swayed, pressing his pelvis to hers, staring into her eyes. Even in her fury
at his cowardice, Mary might have given her life in that moment to have one more dance with Gooch.

I
n spite of being frazzled, Ronni Reeves looked chic in her red knit dress and high-heeled leather boots and clinking silver
jewelry when she answered the front door. “Tom went out of town today so you won’t have to worry about another scene tonight,
Mary. How’s Jack?”

“He’s in the hospital,” Mary said. “He won’t be coming home again. I’m going to be staying with Eden.”

“I’m sorry.”

Mary nodded, and gestured at Ronni Reeves’s dress attempting to lighten the mood: “That color looks nice on you.” Ronni thanked
her, trying not to notice her navy scrubs. “I haven’t had much time for shopping,” Mary explained, shifting her smock. “I
forgot to ask you last night about the boys’ bedtime.”

Ronni scrunched her nose. “They don’t really have a bedtime.”

When their mother was gone, Mary found the boys waiting for her on the living-room sofa beside a stack of books. She settled
in beside them as they jostled to pass her their favorite. “Read this one, Mrs. Goochie,” Joshua begged.

“Goochie!” the other boys shrieked.

“How about you boys call me Mary?” she said, laughing.

After she’d read a dozen books, she saw that the lads were getting sleepy and said, “Let’s go find pajamas.”

With no TV to beg for, they quietly followed her up the plush stairs and into the huge bedroom they shared. There the sleepy
boys were revived, and began to chase one another over the trio of tiny beds. Mary tried to stop them, shouting, “This is
not what we do before bed!”

Jeremy laughed. “This is what
we
do before bed.”

“Boys!” she said, clapping her hands as their mother had done, the gesture just as ineffective for her. Jacob threw a pillow
at her head. She reached for the light switch, flipped it off and closed the door so they were in blackness.

Jeremy shouted, “No!”

Jacob screamed, “Turn it on!”

She turned the light back on. They regarded her strangely before resuming their play, throwing pillows and jumping on the
beds. She flipped the switch off. “Turn it on! Turn it back!” She flipped it back on. And so it went, until the triplets,
whose labor of stopping and starting play was more intense than hers, finally gave up.

After tucking the tykes into their beds, Mary kissed them each on the forehead. “Leave the hall light on, Mrs. Mary,” Jeremy
pleaded. She wished she could tell them that it wasn’t the dark they needed to be afraid of.

When Ronni returned, she was confused by the quiet, surprised to find Mary sitting on the sofa with a book. “Where are they?”

“They’re asleep.”

“No fussing? No tantrums?”

“None.”

“You’re not Mary Gooch—you’re Mary Poppins.” Ronni counted some bills from her handbag and passed them to Mary, insisting,
“I don’t feel right not paying you. And I did really well tonight. Thank you.”

Pushing the bills back, Mary said, “I can’t take the money. I can’t work here. Remember? I’m Canadian. And I really don’t
need it.” She reached for the door and stepped onto the porch to breathe the air.

“Everyone needs money,” Ronni said, joining her on the porch, pressing the bills back into her hand.

“I don’t. Really. My husband won the lottery.”

“Right.”

“He really did. He won on the scratch-and-win. He put twenty-five thousand dollars in my account.”

“He won the lottery and put twenty-five thousand dollars in the account before he left you,” Ronni said drolly.

“Yes.”

Ronni saw that she was serious. “How much did he win? As his wife you’re entitled to half.”

“Gooch would know that. My guess is he won fifty.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“I know Gooch. He’d do the right thing.”

“He left you. He won money and left you. But you
know
he’d do the right thing?”

Her tone made Mary shiver. She started down the walkway, saying, “I should get back, in case my mother-in-law…”

“Why don’t you rent yourself a car?”

“My purse was stolen and I don’t have a replacement driver’s license yet.”

Ronni Reeves smiled with a thought and stepped back into the house, appearing after a moment with a key dangling from her
lovely hands. “Take the Ram.” She pointed at the big white pickup in the driveway.

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t have a car. Take the Ram. For your babysitting services. For however long you’re here. That’s how I’ll repay you.”

“Take the Ram?”

“It’s Tom’s. For his warrior weekends. He said he’d be out of town for a while. Have you ever driven a truck?” She pressed
the keys into Mary’s palm.

Plowing down the hill toward Eden’s house in the Dodge Ram, Mary felt giddy thinking of the freedom offered by the wheels,
reminded of how badly she’d wanted to ride Christopher Klik’s motorized bike that day so long ago. She parked in the driveway,
surprised to see the Prius since Eden had planned to stay at the hospital into the evening.

She crept into the house in case Eden was asleep and found her mother-in-law on the Ethan Allen with the telephone in her
lap. She was staring straight ahead, disconnected, startled when Mary spoke. “I borrowed a vehicle. A truck. Is it fine that
I parked it in the driveway?”

“You borrowed a truck from whom?”

“From Ronni Reeves. My friend up the street. The one I babysat for.”

“Your
friend?
”

Mary was reminded of Irma in her middle age, the beginning of her frozen confusion. “I met her a few days ago, Eden. I told
you about her earlier. Her father went to college with Jack. Ronni Reeves?”

Eden shook her head. “Jack knew so many people. We couldn’t go to dinner without seeing someone. It got tedious. Anyway, that’s
nice you have a vehicle. You did mention something about babysitting.”

“I was thinking I might drive to the ocean.”

“It’s late, Mary.”

“But it’s not far, right? And I’m not tired. Will you come with me?”

“I’m going back up to the hospital for a few more hours. I just came home to make some calls.” She paused before announcing,
“The two from the Bay Area are driving down in the morning.”

“Jack’s daughters?”

“The other’s going to call when she’s booked a flight.” Eden rose, her black bob swinging over her sunken cheeks. “I dug out
a few of Jack’s old polo shirts. He was big for a while. You’d never guess that to see him now. One of them might fit you,
Mary.” She grabbed a sweater from a hook at the door. “That hospital is so cold.”

After waving goodbye to Eden, Mary found several pastel polo shirts laid out on the bed and chose the largest, a mint green
color. After relieving herself of her navy smock, she pulled on the cotton shirt, pleased to see that it fit over the lump
of her gut.

Hoisting her body into the Ram, charged with anticipation, Mary thought of how she had never dreamed of seeing any ocean until
Big Avi had pointed the way, but now it felt like a quest. The road to the coast was another roller coaster, but this one
in the dark. Twists and turns and climbing up and racing down, past unseen landscape she could barely imagine. A turn in the
road and she caught the distant glass of the Pacific in the thrall of a starry black night. She drove on, past the lit-up
mansions nestled in the hills toward the coastline, opening the truck’s windows, letting the wind lash her face.

She reached the coast and found a place to park on the side of the road. The beach was empty and dark but she couldn’t hear
her fear over the call of the surf. She climbed out of the truck, judging the distance to the black water, then slipped off
her sneakers and made her way through the cool sand.

Her breath came in gasps as she soldiered on toward the surf, and she felt her soul shift within her body, as though straining
for a better point of view. With only the ambient glow from the highway to light her way. She stopped at the shoreline, holding
her hand to her heart, not because she felt that familiar pain but because she was stung by the night’s beauty, the black
water rising before her, the nearness of the heavens and the feeling of being so small as to be a grain of sand beneath her
feet, and so light that she might be swept up by the evening’s breeze. She paused to worship at the ocean’s feet, to concede
the tininess and brevity of life, to pray for humanity in distant lands across the water and to give thanks because the world
was a marvel.

“
Agua
,” she said aloud.

She lifted her pants and dipped her plump pink feet, shocked by the icy cold, picturing Gooch standing in the surf of the
same ocean. What would he be thinking? Surely by now he’d have come to some conclusions about his life, his marriage.
He’s already made up his mind.

Finding a cool, dry place in the sand, she settled down. Checking to ensure that she was alone, she stretched out on the white
grains, arms at her sides, like a child making a snow angel, reminded once again of the night in Leaford she’d lain naked
beneath the storm. She found the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the band of light Hay-su had pointed out as the Milky Way,
and let her eyes roam, hoping to see another shooting star so she could make a wish. No matter that Jesús García claimed there
was no magic in the cosmos; she understood, lying beneath the dazzling canopy, why people put their dead in the heavens. Why
they imagined God in the sky. After a time she closed her eyes, searching her lids for clarity, hoping that God would throw
in her two cents.

Orin had told her to get a drink from the hose and push on. Heather had said the same thing. But if pushing on meant returning
to Canada without seeing Gooch, she could not. Each time she imagined leaving, a nagging voice warned that if she left she
would be missing something vital. She decided that, at the very least, her waiting was not for naught. She felt valued by
Eden. And by Ronni Reeves and her boys. She had a vehicle, and money in the bank. This pondering of her predicament did not
feel familiar. No spiral of despair. Just a quiet consideration of her existence. That internal revolution.

Without drawing conclusions or mixing metaphors, Mary left the wondering about her husband and turned to the curiosity of
her lost appetite. She could name each morsel she’d ingested in the previous few weeks, less food than she’d eaten most days
in her other incarnation. That demon hunger, her constant companion, had morphed into gatekeeper.

But a thing lost could be found. Like her purse. Her husband. Or maybe it was gone forever, like her babies. Heather. Gooch?
She never again wanted to hear the roar of the obeast, but knew she couldn’t sustain herself indefinitely with a vague nausea
around the subject of food.

She rose, pushed through the sand, fished for her truck key in the pants pocket of her damp navy scrubs, strangely comforted
to be wearing Jack’s old polo shirt—as if she’d brought his essence along with it, to bid farewell to the sea.

Driving back into Golden Hills, Mary stopped at the light where the twelve lanes met and cast her eyes toward the dark vacant
lot where the memorial to the fallen man stood. The pain between her eyes, which she’d been managing with the tablets from
the pharmacist, flared unexpectedly and she wondered if she might have to pull over. But it passed.

Like all things. All things.

W
aking the next morning, Mary expected to see dawn greeting the blanched hills behind the motel, and realized how quickly the
unfamiliar had become the expected. Leaford had been her only home until a few days ago, and although she’d never wanted or
intended to leave, she had quickly grown accustomed to the view from her Golden Hills window, and to the landscaped medians
of the little town, and the brilliant blue sky, and the fiery, healing sun. She wondered how long it would take for Eden to
become accustomed to Jack’s absence. Or her to Gooch’s. Who was missing Heather? Had her son been told?