The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

I cannot watch movies anymore because I always hear what Henry would say about them, I cannot read, I cannot watch television, and I don’t really want to have to see or talk to anyone at all. I have nothing to do but pluck stray dark fibers out of the white of our carpet and think about what my husband did. So, I sit on our white bedroom floor in my worn black sweatpants, stare at the lines in the beige wallpaper, and think of the answers to your questions.

Now, all of my memories are contaminated, the picture on my table that shows him in his dark gray suit standing next to Elvis in the Chapel of Love where we eloped mixed with a scratchy pencil drawing of a victim sobbing on the witness stand, to-do lists written on Post-Its that I find still stuck inside of the closet and medicine cabinet juxtaposed against the pleading letters sent to me from jail, and it is the same handwriting, and that does not seem fair. It should be easy to separate, to split the lover from the rapist, to cut them apart, to distill my memories, to pasteurize them. That is what I am most angry about: he has left nothing untouched.

I glance at the clock: 1:00 am. I crawl onto the bed and lay flat on my back on top of the comforter. I leave the overhead light on and stare at the ceiling until the morning sun creeps through the windows. I shower, get dressed, and then sit at our huge dining room table with a cup of coffee and wait until it is 9:00 and I can leave for work. I sit on his side of the table now, so that I don’t have to stare at his empty chair and picture the way he sat up perfectly straight while he read the comics — never the front page or even the business news, Henry only read the Lifestyles and Sports sections of the paper. He always sat up rigidly, though his eyes were heavy with sleep. I try to remember ever seeing Henry relax, and I can’t. He reminded me of a dog just given the command to freeze, poised and waiting for another command so he would know what to do next.

I drive through the thick suburban traffic and wonder if the other drivers, all alone in their cars as I am in mine, know who I am married to. I wonder if they know who they are married to. Perhaps their husbands are worse than mine, perhaps my husband is innocent and one of them will soon be in my place, hiding in the master bedroom and searching for the illusive moment when her life went wrong.

At the pastel-pink makeup counter, I give makeovers, to encourage women to buy skin creams and lotions that we both know will not remove their wrinkles and leave them with a younger, happier life, and I almost forget his supposed crimes. I pick up the phone to call him, careful to hold the white receiver away from my cheek so that my foundation does not leave a light brown stain, and then remember that he is in jail, not performing root canals, and he doesn’t have a phone, and even if he did, charming anecdotes about the abuses of eye shadow are not what he would want to hear. It is not as easy as it should be to cut off your now-criminal husband, not like a hangnail or even a gangrene-infested limb. I could deal with the ghost pains left after amputation, but I cannot will myself to amputate.

“Making a call, Darlene?” says one of the other makeup girls, Ali, who wears black fishnet stockings every day. I wonder if it’s the same pair.

“No,” I answer, and put the phone back onto the receiver. She crosses the small space from the sunless tanning creme display to where I stand, by the phone, the cash register, and the sticky sweet newly released perfume called Luminescent Honey. Ali and I used to go out for margaritas after work, but after Henry’s arrest, I caught her on the six o’clock news saying that she always thought Henry was a little too quiet, and that I once came to work with a black eye. That black eye had been from a skiing accident, in which I tumbled down the slope and kicked myself in the face with my ski, and she knew it. I haven’t spoken to her, except for work-related conversations, since I saw that clip.

“How are you?” says Ali, stretching out the word “are” so that it covers the space three words normally fill in her rapid babble.

“Really, how are you?”

“I’m considering suicide,” I say, just to see what she will do. Her face freezes into its pat expression of concern and her eyes double in size so that she looks exactly like the life-sized doll head I had as a kid that you could put makeup on and then wash clean before curling its hair into a huge synthetic bouffant. “But then, who would you have to talk about?”

She pulls down her white lab coat, the kind that we all wear over our black clothes, that I suspect are intended to make us look like experts. My husband wore a white lab coat, too. I wonder what he wore when he did those things, if he had a special outfit, or if he wore his clothes, the clothes that I always bought for him because he hated to shop. My stomach rumbles and I worry that I will throw up all over Ali and her fishnets and lab coat and green eye shadow. She is still staring at me. Two of the girls over at one of the other makeup counters are looking at us and talking in low voices, as they have been for the last few months. I want to tell them that I know what they’re talking about, that they’re talking about me and Henry, but I don’t want to mention his name.