The Abandoned Wife novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Thursday at Eleven

From a clinic office Dara watches her husband's livestreamed eulogy get every detail of her wrong; she keeps the name Salter, and the one person she calls from memory is her old mentor.

At ten fifty on Thursday morning, Dr. Eckstein set his laptop on the desk and turned it to face my wheelchair.

"Four days are up at eleven," he said. "No call came."

"I know."

"Our desk took a dozen calls since Monday. Ten were reporters, one was a church lady, and one was a man selling duct work."

"None of them was a husband asking where his wife was."

"No."

I had spent three nights in a spare room above his clinic, listening to the rain and the refrigerator downstairs.

His mother ran the diner next door, and she had sent up soup every night without a word.

"Press play," I said. "Then you can call whoever you like."

On the screen, a church in Chicago filled up with people in black.

The camera was shaky and the audio crackled, because the company had set up a livestream for what the caption called our family.

Six hundred names scrolled in the chat, mostly drivers from the freight yard in Gary.

Lilies covered the front of the church, thick white ones.

I'm allergic to lilies.

Tom had known that for six years.

A closed casket sat under the flowers, polished and silent.

"Who's in it?" I asked.

Dr. Eckstein didn't answer.

Then Tom walked to the podium, and my stomach turned over.

He looked wonderful.

His black suit fit, and his eyes were red, and he gripped the wood with both hands.

"Dara loved lilies," he said.

His voice cracked in exactly the right place.

"She loved this city, and she loved flying, and she never once asked me for anything."

I laughed out loud, one hard bark.

I had asked him for dinner on Tuesdays.

I had asked him to read the contracts I rewrote at midnight at our kitchen table.

I had asked him, in January, whether we were ever going to be a family, and he had said "Not now."

"She made me a better man," he told six hundred people. "And she'd want me to keep going. To be happy again."

The camera swung to the front pew.

A thin woman in a black wool coat sat there with her long dark curls pinned up.

She dabbed her eyes, and her other hand rested on Tom's empty seat.

I knew her handwriting, her perfume and the exact way she said his name.

"That's Lena," I said.

"The one who called?"

"She's sick. She collapses. She'd had three collapses that year and every one of them got her what she wanted."

"I'm a doctor," Dr. Eckstein said mildly. "Nobody collapses on schedule."

"She does."

On the screen, Tom stepped down from the podium and Lena stood to meet him.

He put his face in her hair.

He held her for a count of five.

Six hundred people watched a widower break, and I watched a man find his place.

Dr. Eckstein closed the laptop halfway.

"That's enough."

"No." I pushed it open again. "I want to remember it."

The camera lingered on the casket, then on the lilies.

"Whose body is in that box?" I asked, and I said it quietly, because I already guessed.

He took a breath.

"The other driver. A woman in a sedan. She was burned past knowing, and the trooper took your husband's word for it."

"Does she have a family?"

"The coroner couldn't find one. Nobody's asked for her."

I held the arms of the wheelchair.

Somebody had loved a girl in that sedan and had not been told.

"She's lying in my grave," I said.

"Yes."

"Then I'll give it back to her, and her name too." My throat hurt. "But not today."

"Dara."

"Not while he's standing there crying on camera. I'm not going to be a ghost who calls him for a scene."

I thought about it for one long minute while the organ played.

Then I told him the plan the way I used to lay out a negotiation, with the end first.

I would not call my husband.

I would not call the troopers while a woman's family was still unknown.

I would heal.

I would use my own name, and one day I would walk into a room that he could not leave, and I would put the truth in front of him with a price on it.

"That's patient," Dr. Eckstein said.

"I was good at it, once."

A knock came, and his mother's soup came through the door with a girl from the diner.

Under the bowl was an envelope from the hospital billing office.

I opened it with my thumb.

Forty-eight thousand, two hundred and twelve dollars, addressed to Dara Salter.

"There's a charity fund," Dr. Eckstein said quickly. "I can write it off."

"No."

"It's what it's for."

"He'll pay it, or I will." I put the bill on my lap and smoothed it flat. "I want my name on the receipt."

He looked at me with surprise and a little worry.

Then he pushed the desk phone toward me.

"Is there anyone you can call?" he asked. "Who'd believe you?"

I knew exactly one number by heart that did not belong to Tom.

I dialed it with the receiver tucked under my chin.

It rang twice, and a gravelly voice said, "Gilchrist."

"Bernie," I said. "It's Dara. Don't hang up, and don't say my name."

The line went so silent I could hear her breathing.

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