The Wife's Tale

  Was that what this all amounted to? This leaving of Leaford? This parting with her appetite? This relinquishing of her fear? A revolution—not against herself but in support of herself? She had Gooch to thank, in many ways. But she could see how even a revolutionary could lose perspective. And patience.

  A short time later, she heard noises in the kitchen and went to find Eden.

  “I’m going back to the hospital.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No. You could stay though, if you like.”

  “Do you want me to stay? Until you get back?”

  “I just thought it might be nicer for you than sitting in a hotel.”

  When Eden was gone, Mary stripped the sheets from Jack’s bed and opened the windows to sweep out the stale air. She vacuumed dead skin from the waves of worn broadloom, and dusted the framed photographs on his dresser. After a thorough cleaning of his room, she washed the dishes and put on the laundry and swept the terracotta floor in the hallway. She hummed while she worked, pondering her satisfaction. “You know this feeling to serve?” Big Avi had asked her.

  THE SON’S WIFE

  With Eden still not home, Mary plumped the pillows on the Ethan Allen and sat down to rest. The drapes were partially drawn and the room in shadow as she scanned the bookcase, where there were dozens of old books, including some titles she recognized, and a large leather-bound Bible. She opened the Bible, extracted some of the cash from her purse and tucked it neatly inside before returning it to the shelf, jangled by the ringing phone beside her. She was unsure if she should pick up, and then panicked that it might be Gooch.

  “Hello?” she answered tentatively.

  The receiver went dead on the other end. Or nobody had ever been there at all. Another lost call. Eden said it happened all the time—like the incidence of left wives, Mary supposed.

  As she set the phone back down, she caught sight of a turquoise Chevy pulling up in the driveway. A vintage beauty, which Gooch would have loved, but she saw that the driver was not Gooch, nor was he among the people climbing out of the car. She had decided not to answer the door, and was hiding in the hallway out of sight, when she heard a knock. A voice called, “Hello?”

  Mary turned to see the face of a young man with blue eyes peering in through the tiny window beside the entrance. Opening the door, she found four people watching her from the porch. The young blue-eyed man. An elderly woman with grey eyes. A bony old man with a sable beard and black eyes. A middle-aged man dressed in spandex, who looked as though he belonged on a running truck or in the pages of a fitness magazine, had green eyes.

  “I’m Berton,” the bony old man said. “This is Michael.” The runner. “Donna.” The old woman. “Shawn.” The blue-eyed man. They smiled as the bony, bearded man continued, “You must be Mary.”

  “Yes,” she said, confused as to who the quartet might be and why they knew her name.

  “We’re here for prayer circle,” the man said, looking beyond her into the house.

  “Oh dear,” Mary said. “Eden didn’t call you? Jack was taken to the hospital.”

  Given the nature of his illness, the group seemed unreasonably surprised.

  “I guess prayer circle is cancelled,” she added, holding the door.

  The young man jolted. “We don’t cancel prayer circle.”

  “We never cancel prayer circle,” Berton agreed, gesturing into the house.

  Mary shifted to allow the four inside. She had envisioned a less diverse group. And hadn’t Eden said there were six? “I haven’t made food,” she remembered, and was relieved when the old woman—Donna—smiled and patted her arm.

  “Will you join us, Mary?” Berton asked, making his way to the living room.

  Not wanting to join them, but without reason to decline, she nodded and followed, squinting when Shawn pulled back the drapes to let in the sun. Berton and Michael took the chairs by the window. Mary found a place on the sofa between the other two.

  “Gil and Terri won’t be joining us,” Berton announced, before reaching out to join hands with the runner on one side and the blue-eyed man on the other. Mary gave her hands to the young man, and the old woman, who also joined hands with the runner.

  They considered each other, Mary following their lead, gazing into the blue eyes, the grey, the black and the green. She was surprised to see that no one in the prayer circle had a Bible, and wondered if they’d borrow Eden’s and find the money she’d hidden between the pages. It was Shawn who finally spoke, his smooth young voice liberating vibrations from his throat that trickled down his arm and flowed from his hand to Mary’s. “We are your humble servants. Shawn, Donna, Berton, Michael and Mary,” he said, casting her a glance. “We’re gathered today to pray for Jack. Lord, have mercy on our brother Jack.”

  Together the group murmured, “Let us pray.”

  “And we’re here to pray for Mary,” he added, as all eyes turned toward her.

  She yanked her hands back from the strangers. “You don’t have to pray for me.”

  Shawn tilted his head. “Eden told us why you’re here.”

  The son’s wife. Of course, Eden had told her prayer group about the fat daughter-in-law who had come to California to look for her wayward husband. She could see by their expressions that they had prayed for her already. For Gooch too, no doubt. Mary wondered if Eden had told these people about Heather. The blue-eyed man said nothing about praying for the lost daughter’s soul.

  “Please, Mary.”

  Wedged between the old woman and the young man, certain of her obligation to Eden and with nothing more to lose, Mary took his hand and joined with Donna once more. In the glare of the hot sun, she shivered when Shawn said, “Lord, help Mary Gooch find what she’s looking for.” The group murmured their assent. “Let us pray.”

  Mary lowered her gaze along with the others, waiting for the prayer circle to begin. She guessed that they would take turns reading Scripture before offering their special prayers for Jack’s soul. And their meditations on her own search. She hoped they would pray for Heather. Someone had to pray for Heather.

  The clock ticked but no one opened their eyes. With the sun on her face and the bodies pressed against her and the heat of the strangers’ hands in her own, Mary watched the foursome of bent heads. Were they really talking to God? Could such communion be read on a face?

  She thought of Jack, sorry for his end, even if he was little more than a stranger. And sorry for Eden, who would be left, like her, alone. God help Eden, she thought, and wondered if it counted as prayer. How many times in how many nights had she prayed to God? Wished to God? Given hollow thanks. Made shallow requests. Uncertain as to the exact nature of the him or her or it she was trying to reach. She considered her altered relationship with her own spirit; here she was, thousands of miles away, different. People did change. The path of a life could take a sudden left and deliver a very different future.

  Focused on her breath, thinking of Heather’s half-lived life, Mary was determined that her own end would not be one of calculated risk. She saw her path rise up, not a trench in the mud but a cobbled road under a canopy of trees. As she waited for the prayer circle to begin, she realized that it already had.

  When it was over, she felt cheated by the brevity of their silent joined prayer, and was shocked to see by the clock that a full hour had passed. The quartet left as quietly as they had come, no clap of thunder, no shouting rhetoric, no platitudes, no proselytizing. No words at all.

  When the Prius pulled up a short time later, Mary was enjoying a respite of calm on the Ethan Allen.

  “I forgot to bring some pictures for him,” Eden said, bursting into the hall.

  “Did they say how long he’d be in?” Mary asked. “I cleaned out his room. The sheets are in the dryer.”

  “He won’t be coming home, Mary,” Eden said stiffly.

  “Why don’t you sit down a minute?” Eden took a spot beside her on the sofa. “Why don’t I make y
ou some tea?”

  “I don’t want tea,” Eden said. “I want Jimmy. I want Heather. Oh Mary, what have I done?”

  Mary gathered Eden’s fingers.

  “The last time I saw her, she had vomit on her sweater,” Eden said. “I can’t stop thinking about that.”

  “The last time I saw her,” Mary said, remembering Heather with the locket, “she was smiling.”

  After a time, feeling Eden’s quiet breath beside her, Mary realized that the old woman was asleep. Like a weary mother with a sick child, she closed her eyes too. When she opened them again she was alone, Eden clanking dishes in the kitchen down the hall. She followed the sound, stopping at the doorway as Eden announced, “We should eat something.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, though neither moved toward the fridge.

  “I have to get on the phone with the agency before I go back up to the hospital,” Eden reminded herself.

  “You don’t need to hire a replacement for Chita. I could help, Eden. I’ll help.”

  Eden paused. “Would you stay with me?”

  “You want me to stay with you?”

  “You could sleep in Jack’s room.”

  Mary checked the clock, remembering her babysitting job. “I can’t be back here until nine, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m babysitting for a woman up the street.”

  “Babysitting?”

  “It’s for someone I met. She knows you and Jack. Ronni Reeves. I sat for her last night.”

  “Well, I suppose you always were the type to make friends easily.”

  Nothing was further from the truth, Mary thought, but said, “Yeah.”

  “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 teenaged boy ran past her in a blur of testosterone, meeting a teenaged 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.

  AFRAID OF THE DARK

  In spite of being frazzled, Ronni Reeves looked chic in her red knit dress and high-heeled leather boots and clinking silver jewellery 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 colour 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 favourite. “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 pyjamas.”

  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 labour 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 licence yet.”
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  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?”