Michael’s Wife Read online

  Then she sat back and considered all the things she hadn’t said, couldn’t say. The threatening shadow in the courtyard. The hearing in Denver. The probationary sentence. The fact that her husband didn’t want her. That everyone loathed her and she didn’t remember one good thing about herself.

  If Claire could have convinced Jimmy he really was a “bad boy,” would he have grown into one? If she could see herself only as she was mirrored in the eyes of others would she become what they thought she was?

  With Jimmy asleep and the cooler off the house lay in prickly silence. An occasional car would go by on the road running between Myra’s and the base. Her nerves jumped when the old refrigerator clicked on. During the day it was easier to forget the fears that haunted her nights.

  Saturday morning she awakened before Jimmy, dressed, and walked to the kitchen only to stop in the doorway and stare.

  Michael stood in front of the sink in pajama bottoms, filling the coffee pot.

  There was something incongruous about this large half-naked man in the tiny kitchen. He looked now more like the “Mike” Myra spoke of than the sophisticated reserved Michael she had known in the elegance of Tucson.

  But when he turned to face her, she was looking at the old Michael with the cold pale eyes and steel set to his jaw. Michael could look arrogant even in pajama bottoms.

  Laurel felt the answering sullen pout forming on her lips as she moved into the kitchen to prepare breakfast for three.

  Jimmy did most of the talking at the table, regaling his father with his activities of the week. Since he’d been playing with Sherrie his vocabulary had at least quadrupled.

  Michael watched him with interest. “So you like living here?”

  “Yeah. It’s good. Sherrie pays wis me and Mommy tell me story and.…”

  “Don’t you miss Claire?”

  “Claire’s a bad boy!” When he’d finished his breakfast, Laurel turned Jimmy out to run through the sprinkler with Sherrie, and she and Michael sat over a second cup of coffee.

  He looked tired, the worry lines on his forehead too deep for his age, his movements slower, less abrupt. She wasn’t surprised. If he’d slept much that week, it hadn’t been at home.

  “What do you do? On the base, I mean.”

  “Train pilots.”

  “Do you fly?”

  “Some.”

  “Shouldn’t you get more sleep?”

  “Are you worried about me, Laurel?” His eyebrows lifted in mock surprise as he rested both elbows on the table and held the cup to his lips.

  “It just seems dangerous, is all.” She met the coldness in his eyes above the coffee cup and looked away. He seemed to be able to go forever without blinking.

  It was unreal sitting in this room with him. To an outsider they would look like a normal couple talking idly over the breakfast table. She tried hard to remember a time when they might have done this before. She couldn’t even imagine it. “What was I like … before you went to Vietnam?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “No … please … just pretend I know but I want you to tell me anyway.”

  “What do you want now, Laurel, compliments?” He took a long time stacking his dishes and then rose, holding them in one hand, and stood by his chair for a moment looking down, not at her but through her. “You were … just like you are now.” And then his eyes focused on hers. “But all that’s in between hadn’t happened.” He took his dishes to the sink, effectively closing the subject.

  Laurel thought that anyone changes in two years surely. It was as if she’d stepped into some kind of suspended time when she walked out of that hospital. As if she had skipped those two years while everyone else lived, grew, changed.…

  A brief rap and Myra slid the screen back and stepped into the kitchen. She stopped as she noticed Michael, her dimples fading uncertainly. “Oh … hi, Mike.”

  “Myra.”

  “Excuse me for barging in. But I wanted to know if you all would come over tonight for a barbecue? Colleen’s bringing the beer, and you could bring a salad and bread. I’ll have the rest. Kind of late when it gets cool?” she blurted out nervously, one hand still on the screen.

  “Do we dress?” Michael looked amused, at her discomfort over finding him home.

  “Well, you could put on your pajama top and a tie. Can you come?”

  “We’ll be there,” he answered for both of them, as if he did it always.

  Laurel was surprised that he hadn’t already made plans of his own for a Saturday night.

  With Michael home, her day was confused. The heat drove them inside with the cooler, which did at least move the air around, but the three of them seemed to stumble over each other in the tiny house. Laurel felt self-conscious with Michael ever-present and strangely unable to find anything to do.

  Jimmy watched television. Michael settled with a book at the kitchen table while she set yeast dough to rise for the patio party. Although she felt Michael’s critical eyes on her back, whenever she turned to glance at him he seemed engrossed in his reading. She started nervously every time he turned a page. When the sunlight began to fade and she could prepare the greens for the salad, she sighed with relief.

  A distant roar and then a fighter screamed overhead. She cut her finger instead of the onion she was chopping.

  Just as she felt the now familiar panic rise in her throat at the sound of the plane, an image literally exploded into her mind.

  Laurel stood transfixed, letting her finger bleed into the sink, her eyes closed … five mounded graves stretched side by side on the desert with little wooden crosses … tall cacti standing guard over them.…

  “What are you going to do? Stand there and bleed to death?” Michael’s curt voice cut through her thoughts, forcing her eyes open, driving the image away.

  Stinging sweat ran into her eyes. Laurel sat down on the kitchen floor before her knees could buckle beneath her.

  Dusk was just turning to night as they congregated on the Patricks’ patio for barbecued ribs. A soft pink lingered in the sky to the west. Heat still rose from the concrete under them, but the air moved a little now, balmy, cooler.

  Colleen arrived last with a tub of ice and beer and a young man in tow. She introduced him as Gary but he knew the men. Sitting at the picnic table with Jimmy on her lap, Laurel braced herself for Gary’s wide-eyed start as she was introduced to him as Michael’s wife. Michael merely stared him down as if daring him to comment.

  Pat enlisted Gary to help pass out beer before the situation could grow uncomfortable and smoothly hurried the dinner and the conversation. Pat was short, stocky, relaxed, with squint lines at the corners of his eyes like Harley’s. A comfortably good-natured man with a raft of ribald stories and the confidence to pull them off. Laurel envied Myra the peaceful life she must have with him.

  Michael sat beside her and helped her fill Jimmy’s plate, solemnly playing the role of family man. Laurel knew without looking that the others watched them closely.

  She winced visibly as Michael leaned across her to hand Jimmy a roll he’d buttered and looked up in time to meet Colleen’s curious glance. The Devereaux’ must appear a very strange couple to these people. But there was no help for it; they were a strange couple.

  Later she helped Myra clear the table and bring out chairs while Colleen regaled the men with a story of her own. The sweating tub yielded another round of beer. Sherrie and Jimmy raced the length of the yard. And it was night.…

  They sat, beer in hand, in a rough semicircle around the light of the kitchen that streamed through the sliding glass doors. No porch light was needed, for the Arizona night was not dark, just soft, mellow. Laurel and Myra sat together at one end of the semicircle facing Colleen, who’d placed herself between Gary and Michael. And Pat, the perfect host, sat between the two groups, joining them together.

  Myra was quieter with men around, turning often to watch the children at play. But Colleen in her short white dress and deep ta
n listened attentively, tossing her blond head and laughing on cue as the men talked of German pilots they were training. She managed to flirt mildly with all three of them.

  Pat held his beer between his legs and put both hands behind his head, leaning the kitchen chair back on two legs. “Hell, those Krauts go at it like they’re planning World War III. Had one up yesterday—he got so excited I thought he was going to eat the stick.”

  And Laurel felt disembodied, as though she were outside the semicircle, watching but not a part of it, only half-conscious of the conversation, half sleepy from the heavy meal and the beer, hearing again her husband’s laughter as Colleen had finished her story.

  She’d been in the kitchen with Myra and the laugh had mingled with that of the other men, but still distinct, deep, abrupt. She’d singled it out, known it at once and yet was hearing it for the first time. He didn’t laugh like that even when he played with his son. Something in her responded to that laugh, and it lingered in his eyes as she walked onto the patio.

  Then his eyes had met hers and the laughter died. She’d killed it by just coming into view, by just being Laurel.

  A car drove past on the road, its lights tunneling into the night ahead. Stars winked above mountains dark on the horizon, reminding her of Tucson. Slow-dying coals glared with red undersides in the barbecue, and the smell of charcoal and spicy ribs still hung about the patio. A muffled giggling erupted from the sandbox.

  Light from the kitchen fell on one half of Michael’s face, leaving the other half in a satanic gloom, reflecting the sheen of his black head, glinting in his eyes—more gray than blue tonight, the color of weathered aluminum.

  He relaxed with his legs outstretched, crossed at the ankles, his arms folded, cradling the beer can with one hand in the crook of his elbow. The curve of muscle rolled out under the short sleeves of his white knit shirt.

  “… when the hippies come back in the fall.”

  “Think they’ll be back?” Gary was talking to Pat but grinning at Laurel’s knees. She crossed her legs.

  “Sure. The world’s getting lousy with them. They’ve got to go where the weather’s nice so they can commune with nature. Myra and I went to Florence last winter just to stare. What a mess. Made the desert look like a city dump. They lived in tents and old cars. Just get rid of the wetbacks and now hippies.”

  Laurel watched Michael’s jaw muscle constrict, his lips tighten to a thin line at Pat’s mention of wetbacks. No one else seemed to notice that a social faux pas had been committed.

  “Well, I feel sorry for them,” Myra said it almost apologetically, as if she had no right to an opinion of her own but couldn’t keep still. “Some of them looked ill. And there were two small kids—dirty, listless. Those hippies can live like that if they think it proves anything, but they don’t have the right to treat children that way.”

  “At least they don’t drop bombs on other people’s children.” It came to Laurel’s lips and was said before she had time to consider it. It was the wrong place to say it.

  They stared at her in silence, probably as startled by the sound of her voice as anything. She’d barely spoken all evening. But if it surprised the others, it left Laurel dumbfounded. She had voiced an opinion. Not well thought out or well expressed, but an opinion. Backed by conviction.

  Pat finally spoke. “Hey, Mike, you brought a dove into our midst?”

  “I’m sure I would be the last to know.” Michael had gone still, watchful. An immense ugly beetle flew into the side of his shoe and flopped onto the concrete on its back, helpless threadlike legs flaying the air, making a horrid buzzing sound.

  Michael brought his heel down on the bug’s middle, squashing it.

  Laurel looked away, fighting the beer back down her throat.

  “I saw that John the Baptist when I was in Colorado a couple of months ago visiting my folks in Boulder. He was the weirdest-looking creature,” Gary said, finally pulling his eyes off the mess at Michael’s foot and reaching into the tub behind him for another beer. “All robes and hair.”

  “What’s his problem anyway?” Colleen asked.

  “Oh, he’s trying to set a fire under the hippies. I saw him in the city park speaking to a bunch of them. They gather there and lay around on the grass. He’s quite a speaker, I’ll say that for him, but I didn’t notice anybody getting stirred up. They just smiled and rolled over.”

  “He’s got the students rioting in Tucson now.”

  “No, that’s fizzled—too hot. But he’ll be back in the fall. If anybody can organize that bunch it’s him. He almost made you want to stand up and say—heil!” Gary shot his arm forward in the Nazi salute.

  Michael listened quietly to the conversation. He leaned back to empty his beer, and when he brought his head down, his eyes, half-lidded, seeing but not revealing, met Laurel’s and held them. To her his stare carried the illusion of weight like the desert sun at noon. Her throat was suddenly so dry it hurt to swallow.

  Colleen finally came to her rescue. “Hey! None of that, you two. You’ve been married too long.”

  Pat hooted and got up, grinning, to replace Michael’s empty can with a fresh one. “It’s the beer. Always works on the quiet ones first.”

  When Myra left the semicircle to collect Sherrie for bed, Laurel followed her lead. Just as she was fighting a dirty, reluctant Jimmy into the house she heard Pat saying from next door … “Won’t be long before we’re calling you Major Devereaux, will it, Mike?”

  She didn’t wait to hear an answer but heard voices and Colleen’s tinkling laughter long after she’d gone to bed. She didn’t know when Michael came in.

  Sunday morning he took Jimmy and they were gone until late afternoon. Michael was determined to be a weekend father if not a weekend husband.

  She watched the Patricks go off as a family. Laurel was miserable—the feeling of being left out, of not belonging, overwhelmed her. After fixing herself a lunch she couldn’t eat, she stretched out on the lumpy couch and tried to nap. Her thoughts turned to the patio party, the people, the conversation … and then that haunting little graveyard with the five wooden crosses flashed across her mind’s eye and was gone. That must be something she’d seen … a faint twinge of nausea, the beginning of a headache.…

  Laurel sat up on the couch. Why should that memory, if that’s what it was, affect her so violently?

  A car pulled up and she went to the door expecting to see Michael and Jimmy. But Evan Boucher crawled out of a Volkswagen.

  The shy smile that moved the thin, drooping mustache out at the corners, the soft hazel eyes. She’d almost forgotten he existed.

  “Hi,” she said before he could, and opened the screen door for him.

  “You look surprised to see me, Mrs. Devereaux. I told you I’d keep in touch.”

  “How did you find us?”

  “I called your sister-in-law.” He followed her into the kitchen where she mixed two tall glasses of iced tea. “Is everything all right … I mean … well, you know?”

  “Everything’s fine,” she lied. “I’m glad you stopped by, Evan. Michael and Jimmy are at the zoo and I was looking for something to do.”

  He stayed nearly two hours, chatting, drinking several glasses of tea in the little living room. She was grateful for the visit; it relieved the loneliness of her day. They discussed the weather, Paul’s research, and Evan’s summer courses in Tempe. She let him ramble about John the Baptist.

  Evan seemed more relaxed and less clumsy here than in the more intimidating atmosphere in Tucson. He was letting his hair grow longer and had added cowboy boots to his regular jeans and work shirt. He still blushed if she stared at him too intently.

  Finally they sat quiet for a few minutes and then Evan said, “Are you happy here?”

  “I feel lost wherever I am.”

  “But nothing’s happened? No one’s tried to hurt you or anything?” He blushed and looked away. “That’s really why I came. I was worried.…”

  “
You think I’m in danger from my husband, don’t you, Evan?”

  He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know the man … but I don’t like the way he looks at you, Mrs. Devereaux. What do you think?”

  “I think he’s had plenty of time to do something … if he wanted to. We’re pretty much alone here. Sometimes I think I imagined that someone chased me in the courtyard in Tucson … and sometimes I worry that I’m not quite sane.” She walked about the room restlessly and then sat next to him on the couch. “Evan … those people who … where you worked … some of them remembered? Didn’t they?”

  “Sure. Most of them did.” He put a warm hand over her cold one. “And you will, too. Nothing’s come back yet?”

  “No,” she lied again because she didn’t want to discuss those two brief flashes of memory, didn’t like her reaction to them. “Maybe I should be in an institution, but I don’t want to leave Jimmy. I can’t stand to be away from him.”

  He patted her hand absently and looked off into space. “That kind of institution is a pretty rough place to be in.” Evan Boucher’s hand trembled. “I almost went crazy just working in one.…”

  12

  The heat in Phoenix and Glendale was worse than that in Tucson because of the humidity. Canals, irrigation ditches, and irrigated fields that made the Valley of the Sun a unique green oasis of the desert also made it a sticky, choking hotbox with the air so thick one almost had to chew it to breathe it. This situation was relieved only when dry winds hurled off the desert, breaking tree limbs and driving sandy grit into homes and cars and mouths.

  July brought rain, violent electrical storms that promised coolness but left behind a humid unbreathable heat worse than before. After a gentle flowering spring the desert summer seemed intent upon forcing out its human intruders.

  The cooler clanged away day and night doing a little more than just moving the air around but adding to the clamminess within the house until clothes, sheets, towels, and skin were constantly sticky. It depended upon evaporation for cooling and could do little with the humid heat. The Patricks gave up and bought a refrigeration unit. The Devereaux endured.