The Secret Lives of Married Women (11 page)

“Rae,” I said. “Is there anything Angel could do that would change your feelings about him? I don’t mean anything he could do to you—I mean something he might do to someone else.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I guess so—like if he hurt a little kid or something. But he would never do that. He’s in the life, in the game, and there’s a certain honor to it. He wouldn’t hurt anybody who wasn’t trying to hurt him or his people first.”

“What if...” I said. “Just, as a hypothetical question—what if he killed someone?” I didn’t quite manage to look at her as I asked this.

“To tell you the truth? He probably has,” she said. “But no. That’s not something that would change the way I feel about him.”

“Rae. I know you have great sex with this guy,” I said. “But aside from that. Do you really love him?”

“I really love him.”

* * *

Something changed after this conversation. Had I just needed permission? To accept what Stas had done? After talking with Rae, something shifted, lifted, inside me. As I got into my car, I felt a certain lightness. I had wished Jack were dead, and now he was. I felt lithe and agile and devious. Glinting with secrets, with hidden power.

For the first time since the earliest days of our marriage, Stas and I had sex every night. All day, all evening, I waited for it. The moment Clara was asleep, I tugged him toward the bed. I would join him in the shower without warning, straddle him at his desk when he was working. When we weren’t in bed, I would stare at him as I’d stared at Clara for the first few days after she was born. It was as if I were seeing him for the first time. During weekday afternoons, when Clara was napping, I lay in our bed and touched myself, thinking only of him.

Every day I recorded more poems and often they took on a special resonance.

Now I’ll take to bed

this body and the phantom

of what it once was, inseparable

as they are these days, smoke

rising from a stubborn fire.

In an upscale maternity boutique in Portland, I bought a sassy bikini set: a black bra with a pink satin bow front and center; a matching g-string with its bow at the back.

“What is this about a movie you were in?” Stas asked me one night. “What is the name?
Back Pay?”
This actually made me laugh now.

“Payback.”

“It was a porn movie?”

“Not hard-core porn. And I didn’t have real sex with anyone but my boyfriend,” I said. “But beyond that, there was plenty of nudity and simulation. I mean, it was trashy.”

“Did you need money at that time?” Stas asked. “What made you decide to be in a movie like this?”

“I wanted to,” I said. “I was nineteen.”

And although we had just made love, I felt him harden once more against the round swell of my belly.

The days grew longer. In late June, I felt the baby move for the first time. Not long after that, we went for an ultrasound and were jubilant to learn I was carrying a boy. We decided to make the nursery walls Wedgwood blue instead of yellow. Stas declared he would do it himself and made good on his word the very next weekend.

We spent the Fourth of July holiday in Seattle, visiting some old friends, leaving late in the afternoon the Thursday before. It was the first road trip I could remember where Stas and I didn’t argue. I let him play Frank Sinatra all the way there. He let me plan too many activities. We went to Pike Place market for
piroshkis;
we took Clara to the aquarium. On Friday evening, the Fourth, we rode a ferry to Bainbridge Island, just Stas and me—Clara was asleep at the house of our hosts. From a blanket on the waterfront beach, we watched the fireworks over Eagle Harbor.

Lying there with my husband’s arm around me, my head on his shoulder, the fireworks bursting against the black sky, it came to me that I was happier than I had ever been. And yet this happiness didn’t feel the way I’d always imagined it would. It felt fearful and precarious. As if it might be taken from me at any moment.

I hadn’t really considered our situation until now, hadn’t let myself consider it. Being here in Seattle allowed me to look at it sidelong; it was the distance between us and the detective. We hadn’t seen him during the last week or two, but I knew his work on Jack’s case was far from over. He was investigating a murder. It didn’t get more serious than that. He wasn’t going to just give up and go away for good. He would be back and likely it was just a matter of time before something tipped him off to Stas’ involvement. Wasn’t that the way it always happened? In books and in movies, the killer always made some slight and yet fatal mistake.

If Stas was caught—oh, it made my throat tight just to think about it—if he were caught, then he would be taken away from me for decades, maybe even forever. And just like that, overnight, I’d be a single mother with an infant and a toddler. I’d be alone with the two of them twenty-fours a day, seven days a week—at least for the next several years, until they were old enough for school.

But no. No, of course it wouldn’t be like that. As staggering a thought as that was, it was sheer wishful thinking next to the certain reality that I’d have to go back to work, and Clara and her brother would be in some cheap wretched day care unless the rest of my family was willing to treat me as a perpetual charity case.

And Stas. Stas would be locked away. In some terrifying, hard-core facility for violent inmates. I tried to imagine visiting him in such a place. Hauling the kids on some unspeakable hours-long car trip every few weekends to the hellhole where their father was caged. I imagined the humiliation, the isolation, of having a husband behind bars. And not for corporate fraud, or embezzlement, or writing bad checks, but for murder. I would no longer be seen as having married an enterprising, bootstrapping, self-made young man. He’d be just another Russian thug.

I started to hyperventilate and had to sit up. In a moment, I felt Stas’ hand on my shoulder.

“What is it, Leda?”

“I just—oh God—I just felt so nauseous all of a sudden.”

Stas accepted this, as I knew he would. I was pregnant, after all. I made myself slow my breathing and after a moment, I lay back down.

What if we went on the lam? Now, before Stas was even wanted by the law? We were so near the Canadian border. We could cross it and just keep going. And then what? If we were a young and childless couple, we could do anything. We could be migrant workers on a farm or deck hands on a ship. We could go wherever the wind took us, wend our way through Europe, reinvent our lives. We could start over, as Stas seemed so adept at doing.

But none of this could be done with a one-year-old in tow and a baby on the way.

Maybe Stas could strike out on his own, set himself up somewhere and send for us later. He wouldn’t need an I.D. to buy an Amtrak ticket. He could cross the country by train, disappear into Brighton Beach, give up his hard-won English and his hopes for American citizenship. He could get the kind of job offered by men like Vladimir: off the books and paying in cash.

We could join him later—a year or so later, maybe. In the meantime, I’d tell the detective Stas had left me and I didn’t know where he was. I’d give birth in a hospital while I still had health insurance. I would drain my bank account slowly, put the money in a suitcase. Sell the house, though breaking even was probably my best hope. Sell our cars, sell everything we owned. I pictured a yard sale with all our possessions on the lawn. I imagined a sign that said,
Everything Must Go.

How would we cross the country without leaving a trail? Not by plane and not in a car. Like Stas before us, we could pay cash for train tickets, travel east over the course of several days. I pictured our family reunion in some cramped apartment above a Russian storefront.

These scenarios were all unthinkable; they were all impossible. All I wanted was what we already had. A house with a yard, a swing on a tree, a leafy front walk where one day I’d wait with my children for a school bus. There was nothing I wouldn’t give—nothing at all—just to keep everything the way it was.

* * *

We returned late Sunday night, well after dark, and as I got out of the car, I nearly wept at the sight of our damp lawn, the sound of crickets, the bright stars above and the fragrance of woodsmoke. Would it ever feel safe to savor these things, or would I always be waiting for that knock at the door, the slow whirl of red and blue lights in our driveway, the flash of a badge that would level our lives?

It was the very next morning that I saw the article. A newspaper—the local one,
The Columbian
—was spread open on a table at the neighborhood bagel place. On the lower section of the front page were two photographs side by side.

One of them was Jack. I felt the recognition in my body—a stab of the old fear—before I’d even named him to myself. It took another moment to identify the second photo as that of the boss next door.

CONSTRUCTION OWNER CONFESSES TO MURDER OF MISSING VANCOUVER MAN
read the headline.

Warren Albertson, detained Friday night as a suspect in the murder of Jack Shelby, confessed to the crime Saturday afternoon, investigators reported. Albertson, 44, told police that he bludgeoned his longtime employee with a crowbar before choking him to death, then buried his body beneath the house they were renovating. Jack Shelby’s remains were unearthed by sheriff’s investigators following the confession. Clark County coroner Dr. Gavin Blackwell confirmed multiple signs of blunt force trauma to the face and skull. He also cited injury to the neck consistent with manual strangulation.

I eased myself into the nearest chair and sat there, clutching the newspaper in both hands and staring at Warren Albertson’s grainy little mug shot. The suddenness of it left me blindsided.

This man had killed Jack. Not Stas.

Not Stas.

I stayed at the table for several minutes, trying to take in this information. It was a long time before I was able to lay the paper aside. How many days had I been walking around with the conviction that Stas had done it? I hadn’t realized how much space this belief had occupied until it was suddenly dismantled. What amazed me was how hard it was to let go of the idea—the idea of Stas as the killer. Maybe it was even harder to dispel than it once had been to absorb.

I went out to the parking lot with the newspaper and got into my car, where I sat behind the wheel and stared through the windshield.

There was relief, yes. The relief of surfacing from the dangers in a dream, to find yourself not only safe but restored to the familiar contours of your life: the solidity of your body, your bed. All the circumstances you checked at the threshold of sleep.

Relieved and restored and unburdened and bereft.

I wanted to tell someone, but there was no one to tell. Nobody knew I’d suspected Stas in the first place.

* * *

“I saw the paper and couldn’t believe it,” Rae told me over the phone. “That was your guy, right? The stalker next door? Maybe it was wrong to feel this way, but God help me, I said good riddance! I said, what a great break for Leda. And a great break for me too, because now I don’t have to get Angel to rub him out! Ha ha, just kidding, of course.”

“I couldn’t believe it, either,” I said. “Though I can’t say I was too sorry to learn of it.”

“Oh, honey, you must be so relieved. I know I would be. Don’t feel bad about that—after what he put you through, anyone would feel that way.”

When my husband came home, I showed him the clipping. He closed his eyes and exhaled sharply and I saw how afraid he had remained until now. Just before we sat down to dinner, Stas opened a bottle of wine and afterward he spent almost an hour playing with Clara. But later, when we got into bed, I pulled away when he reached for me. For the first time in more than three straight weeks, I told him I was tired.

“That is all right, honey,” he told me. I could tell he was disappointed, but at the moment it was hard to care.

I was disappointed too.

There was no longer a wolf at the door, no longer a wolf in my bed. That left only the wolf in my head.

* * *

More than an hour after Stas had fallen asleep, unable to sleep myself, I lay there and looked at the clean lines of his back, the glint of the gold chain around his neck, the plaid of his flannel pajama pants.

A memory came to me: a spring night during our engagement. I was at an off-Broadway theater with my friend Cecily. We had arrived early because she was in a wheelchair and often needed extra time and space to get settled. This evening, the situation was especially dire: her chair wouldn’t fit into the theater’s narrow elevator and she had no other way to reach the seating area.

The manager was summoned and he was less than accommodating. The only way Cecily would be able to watch the show was if someone were to carry her to her seat, and he told us no staff person would be permitted to lift her. (“That would be a liability.”) Nor would he allow us to seek help from any of the audience members filing in.

In desperation, I called Stas, who was dining with his former roommate in a restaurant across town. More than anything else he’d ever said or done up to that moment, I loved him for standing up midway through dinner, tossing money onto the table, apologizing to Dmitri, and taking a taxi across Central Park to lift Cecily from her wheelchair and carry her to her seat.

Lying there, staring at his back, I thought about his kindness during my pregnancy with Clara. How he wouldn’t let me lift a thing, not even a grocery bag. I remembered my water breaking on my due date, an hour before midnight, the moment after I got into bed thinking,
Oh, well, not today after all.
In a private room at the hospital a couple of hours later, in the middle of the night, he slow-danced with me to the radio while the contractions were still mild.

A difficult time had followed the birth. Stas’ first response to fatherhood was not elation or wonder or an excess of tenderness, but an air of resignation in the face of yet another endurance test. He was dutiful but moody, distant, just this side of begrudging. He slept on the sofa downstairs so he wouldn’t have to wake in response to Clara’s cries, as I did several times a night. This went on until the day he was standing over her at the changing table and she turned her head and smiled at him. Nothing was ever the same after that, and Clara’s first word was
daddy.