The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

“Different how? Husbands and wives stand together in a crisis.” I wonder how to get her off the phone. She isn’t here, visiting her son, standing by his side, she just sends checks to his lawyer, and she probably would try to send care packages full of gingerbread and clean underwear if they would let her. “Or they cause a crisis, “ I say. The cracker sucks my mouth dry and makes it painful to talk. I wish I hadn’t said that.

“Oh,” she sucks in through her teeth, as though I’ve punched her in the stomach. There is silence for a moment, then she continues. I can tell that she’s decided to be sweet to me during this conversation no matter what, even if I tell her that her son is a creepy fucker like I did the last time we spoke. “Those things with my ex-husband are years past. Henry loves us. Handmade cards, that’s love.”

I swallow my cracker, wash it down with 7-Up. I drink 7-Up during any turmoil, it seems to calm my stomach. It hasn’t been working. “How do you know he does?”

Her voice shifts and becomes harder, deeper, and I can hear the rough edge in her throat left over from her twenty-seven years of smoking. “I always told Henry you should have renewed your vows.”

This was the type of comment that, if my husband were still sleeping underneath our deep blue down comforter and not the worn blanket I imagine in his jail cell, would have made me laugh. We were married by someone who asked, “Do you promise to hang on to your hunka hunka burning love till he croaks?” But I have found myself drawn to churches in the last months, pacing up and down streets in front of their imposing permanence, wishing that I could bloody my knees from too much prayer. I wonder what type of responsibility I have in what my husband did. He always prayed, when he thought that I wasn’t looking, mumbling softly just after we got into bed, his hands clenched in a double fist. Why had he prayed, I wonder. Guilt? Solace? Forgiveness? Or was it just an automatic habit instilled by his Presbyterian mother that he simply could not stop performing, like a trained circus elephant’s tricks?

I realize that Eleanor is talking again. “Did you hear what I said?”

“I’ve got to go. Bye,” I say, then hang up the phone, hearing her screeches of “Darlene? Darlene!” as I move the handset toward the receiver. It’s unfortunate she didn’t have any other children. None of her other eggs were strong enough to withstand her.

What did she know, I wonder as I return to my seat on the carpet. Perhaps I can blame her, for staying with a man who beat her and her son, for not putting my husband in enough baseball leagues, for failing to notice signs of his criminal future. But what signs were there that I did not notice? He was a professed atheist who prayed, for one, and he always had insomnia and I, a heavy sleeper, never even knew which nights he wandered through our house and which nights he lay beside me. I should have known that, at the very least I should have recognized his physical presence. My stomach lurches, then drops, leaving me with a queer bottomless feeling.

I slip on my pink flip-flops and go outside. I wander up and down my street in the cool night, as though his insomnia has been passed to me, and search for signs. In crazed moments I think that I might redeem myself as his wife by catching another man trying to assault a teenage girl or, better yet, a grandmother, a sign of an even more depraved mind than my husband’s. All of the houses on our street have the shades drawn, and there’s no sign of people, other than the muted yellow of my neighbors’ lights and the occasional blue flicker of a television. The night air makes me shiver, but my body is covered in a kind of sticky sweat, and I rush home to take a shower. I exfoliate and scrub hard so that my skin turns red. I use two kinds of perfumed soap and a body wash, and blast myself with water so hot that I cringe, but I cannot come out feeling clean.

The running water fills the silence of our three-bedroom two-bath, a new house in which the master suite takes up an entire floor, and I’ve filled it with heavy cardboard boxes. But why, though I have been able to box up his striped ties, the music boxes he gave me each year for our anniversary, and even the picture of the three-hundred-pound Elvis impersonator holding me, looking frightened and pale, that my husband took on our wedding day, can I not just throw them all out? I can’t even put the boxes in the basement, so they wait at the foot of our bed, next to his dresser and in his walk-in closet, a testament to the purgatory I’ve been forced into.