Page 52 of Such a Good Wife

I will myself not to cry. I will not break down, I will get angry. I will get ferociously enraged, and I will find whoever is doing this.

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21

Money.

AS I CROUCH UNDER the bathroom sink later that evening, sitting on my heels, I read the text that finally comes through on the burner phone. The last thing I’d texted was What do you want? And now this is the response.

A second text reads, and don’t pretend you don’t have any.

I stuff the phone back to the corner of the cupboard. The kids are on the back deck helping Collin fill the grill with chicken and vegetables. I can’t think how to respond and I need to get out to my family.

With the cooler weather, the three of them practically live out there. I can hear Ben yelling, whining that he wants to wrap the onions in foil. I imagine Rachel or Collin have inadvertently taken over his special task. Collin will de-escalate before it becomes an issue, I know. I should be cutting cantaloupe for a fruit salad, but instead, I’m hiding a secret phone, communicating with someone who’s blackmailing me and thinks I’m a murderer. How quickly someone’s life can change so completely.

In the kitchen, I pull a bottle of red from the wine rack and open it, then I pull out apples and grapes from the fridge and set up a cutting board on the counter in front of the open kitchen window that looks out to the deck. I make sure they see me, so they know I’m present and not acting strangely. I wave to Ben, who holds up his onion slices with pride. I give him a thumbs-up. The breeze from the open window whispers around my ears and brushes my hair back ever so slightly. It’s a perfect night with my beautiful family. I hold the sensation in my mind, memorizing it. I’m not sure why. Maybe I see myself in prison orange, only seeing my children through bulletproof glass. Maybe I’m afraid that at the very least, they will find out what I’ve done and they will opt to live across town with their father and there will never be a night like this again.

Collin opens the sliding door with an elbow, hands full of raw meat juice he’s come in to wash off.

“Oh, hey.” He kisses my cheek, holding his contaminated hands away from his body. If he is doubting me or suspicious of me, he’s electing to let it go. I feel that he truly believes what he said after the police left: that it’s just a bunch of “hick-town detectives with no experience asking idiotic questions” because they have no real leads. Once the initial jolt of the whole situation wore off, he softened a bit and seems to be over it, so I’ll take it.

“I opened a malbec if you want some.” I lean into his kiss and smile.

“Sure. Thanks.” He washes his hands. We both see out the window that Ben has opened the grill lid in Collin’s brief absence and has dropped a chicken breast. He wails as it hits the deck floor and rolls off into the grass.

“Buddy!” Collin shouts as he runs out to get Ben away from the flame.

“Have him come in and help me with the fruit, hon!” I yell after him, trying to offer a hand. I watch Collin make a show of brushing off the chicken on the ground and telling Ben it’s fine, making him break into a smile, and then handing it off to a smirking Rachel to throw away behind Ben’s back. I smile at their kind conspiracy. I pour two glasses of wine and carry them to the outdoor table.

“You wanna carry out the fruit bowl, bud?” I ask Ben, and he runs inside to the kitchen to help. “We got those bubbly waters you like if you want one?” I say to Rachel, who is now back in her chair, glued to her phone.

“Okay,” she says, absently. Ben carries out the fruit cautiously as if he may spill a very full glass of something, concentrating on not dropping it. I tell him how great he’s doing before I go in to pull some flavored water out of the fridge. I notice the TV on in the living room. The squeaky voices of cartoon animals that I don’t recognize flit bright colors across the screen. Ben must have left it on. I walk over to switch it off, but before I do, I collect the remote and look back through the kitchen to make sure everyone is still outside before I turn quickly to the news, expecting the same dead-end reporting about Luke. At this point, the coverage is fading and there is less big news about the case. Murders and crises of all kinds in New Orleans commandeer the news feeds. Luke is already disappearing by the day.

When I switch over, I’m right. There is a story about a new diet trend, and the anchors make jokes that aren’t funny as they banter back and forth awkwardly after the clip ends. Before I turn it off though, the female anchor changes gears. The face of a woman I don’t recognize is speaking into a mic, being interviewed by the media, but the audio on her is muted as the anchor voices it over, attempting to intrigue the viewing audience to tune back in to hear the full interview.

“Luke Ellison’s wife, Valerie Ellison, speaks out for the first time since her husband’s tragic death. See the whole exclusive interview with her when you join us at ten. You won’t want to miss it. And now, the weather.”

I feel as though I’ve been punched between my shoulder blades, the wind knocked out of me. He was married? No. That’s not possible. The hypocrisy in my outrage over this is not lost on me, but I don’t care. He knew who I was. He knew I wept with guilt, he knew all the times I felt I had to stop. I told him about my children, my life, how my academic dreams were cut short. How could he have not told me? He said he was newly on the market again. But he was married.

I switch off the TV quickly and think about how I can find a way to watch the interview at ten. I can’t record it. Collin might watch TV later on tonight and notice the pending recording before I can delete it. I’m sure they’ve mentioned his wife before—who he was “survived by” and I’d missed it because I can’t have a paper trail of googling his name and I can’t watch the coverage in front of my family. I can’t even begin to imagine what he would think if he saw me following the case—going out of my way to gain information about something that should be like every other devastating news story...unless of course, I knew the person in this unfortunate headline.

As dusk falls, we eat dinner on the deck. A string of decorative lights are crisscrossed above the table, and a citronella candle burns to keep away mosquitos. I swirl my grilled zucchini around on my plate and try to stay present. Collin sips his wine and Ben spreads his coloring sheets across the table as we all linger in the perfect evening air. Ben is an expert on crayon colors—he’s memorized all of them in the huge crayon box—and makes everyone play the crayon game. Collin obliges him. He holds up a green crayon, covering the label.

“Polished Pine,” Ben yelps. “No,” he corrects himself. “Wintergreen Pine.”

“Right!” Then he holds up a silver crayon.

“That one’s too easy. Quicksilver. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone, huh?” Collin shoots me a smile, sharing in the knowledge that, of course, not everyone has this skill. I’m only half listening. I smile back, absently.

“Okay, I’ll make it harder on ya.” He holds up two reddish crayons.

“Rustic Red and Misty Maroon,” Ben says, pointing left, then right.

Collin laughs. “You are unbeatable.”

I put a hand on Ben’s back, giving him an impressed smile. He takes the red crayons from Collin’s hand, pleased with himself, and goes back to coloring. I watch him work on Winnie-the-Pooh’s shirt, and I admire him so much. The way he can so effortlessly forget who he is, where he’s been, or where he might go, and is utterly engrossed in the simple task of smoothing his hand across the waxy surface of a crayon drawing.

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