The night before, we’d been fighting. Actually, Stacey and I never really fought. We had extended silences. A cold, hard distance had grown between us slowly, over a period of months. After a couple years of living here, Los Angeles was too much for her. The noise, the pollution, all the usual problems. Kids who grow up in the City of Angeles, it’s like a second skin, their natural reef. They learn to surf the city like those stoned turtles in
Nemo
. But Stacey and I grew up with land. Trees, hills, the Arkansas River. Tulsa was the Big City. She was depressed, but it seemed somehow worse and simpler than that. I just thought she had bad mood swings, boredom.
This dimming phase followed the latest backlash from Ghost’s final studio album,
Snuffed
, the tour for which I was not invited to join and which he cancelled halfway through, seeking treatment for ‘exhaustion’. I was held back in Los Angeles, positioned to throw off the media. My job was to make them think he was here, bopping around town, not checked into Brighton or wherever he decided to take his spas and counseling that year.
When I wasn’t out doing faux-cameos at clubs or letting kids with their iPhones snap photos of me at malls in Topanga or Long Beach, I worked on the play I planned to direct (it was a hunk of shit). I knew my run with Ghost was coming to an end and Trigger, my manager, was throwing out lines for casting directors, trying to convince them I possessed a range that extended beyond the one-note performance that was scowling like Ghost and slinking away from fans who couldn’t tell us apart. Pining for the role of a
Law & Order
perp, I would have accepted a commercial pouring that blue piss into a diaper.
I usually didn’t fall asleep until about four or five in the morning and slept on the couch so I wouldn’t wake her. I rarely heard her leave the house. I’d rise at eleven, drink coffee, catch up on email, check the casting newsletters and boards. The afternoons were spent working on my play until Stacey got home from work or spending the day with her friends over in Los Feliz.
Perhaps it is my fault she wound up with such friends. I was the one who encouraged her to make the effort. Her friends back in Tulsa were a diverse group, waitresses, bartenders, musicians, art geeks and other school acquaintances making their first forays into the corporate machine before doing the non-profit pull-out and segueing into early motherhood. The LA friends she made through the art gallery and through my end of the business were, like us, transplants, aspiring toward something rarer, with a drive that Stacey found off-putting. They were louder, effervescent to a clamoring degree, hungry for It - and if It demanded becoming the kind of club habitant who lets strange men snort illicit powders from her nipples in the bathroom stall, well, that was just part of the ride.
Whereas Stacey was quiet and never seemed to abandon herself to the giddy cocktail of whatever scene she enjoyed watching, her new LA friends operated as if downing martinis and shrieking at waitresses was the secret to being noticed by the A-list set. They popped pills, chased married men, shoplifted out of boredom and stabbed each other in the back more or less weekly. I think they adopted Stacey as a corruptible country girl, and maybe she was an uncomfortable reminder of how much of themselves they had shed since getting off the bus from Tacoma, Denver, Boise. And they wore her down. Rowina Daniels, the kleptomaniac from North Carolina, she was the one who got Stacey into shoplifting. I’d already been to the police annex in the Riverside Outlet Mall twice that year. Found a tiny pair of cable cutters in Stacey’s purse. That’s not right. Maybe when your girl is fourteen. Not when she’s thirty-one and your wife.
That morning,
the morning of
, as the police later called it, I didn’t see her leave the house. She didn’t call. By evening I was worried. I called her friends, but they hadn’t seen her. I called the garden center, then the art gallery, but she wasn’t scheduled for either that day.
Finally I was standing over the sink, watching the day give way to dusk. I looked through the window, not really even looking for anything, just thinking maybe it was time to call the police. That’s when I noticed the garage door was open. The detached garage was a drive through, so there were two doors, one inside the yard that opened onto the driveway, the other into the alley. I had the sick feeling then, looking at that door. This shadowed hole, calling me from across the yard. I pretended she had just forgotten to shut it, or maybe the battery in her garage door opener had stopped working, but deep down I knew something bad was waiting for me in there.
I drank a glass of water and went out. I didn’t run. I just sort of ambled across the yard, annoyed. And about halfway there I saw her white Audi deep in the garage.
Time jumped a bit.
One second I was standing in the yard. The next I was standing beside the S5, the driver’s side door open, her keys dangling in the ignition. The engine was off. In the console cup holder was a tall plastic tumbler full of her iced coffee. Cubes melted, the creamer floating in white clumps. The car was set too deep, its ass end sticking out into the alley.
My first thought was,
Oh dear God, some psycho in a van snatched her, he’s on his way to Utah with her right now. Just like that Ghost song, ‘Take My Wife’
. The gravity of this, and the evil images that came with it, made me pant. Then I imagined she had left me. I almost wished she had some other man on the side, because I knew whatever was coming would be worse.
‘No,’ I said in the garage.
This is not a crime scene
. ‘She got distracted.’
Once again time seemed to slip.
I was standing in the alley. I looked both ways. And there was a couch I didn’t remember, a riot orange thing with velvet upholstery and great gouts of dirty foam sprung from the cushions. It was the color of insanity. Someone told me that, once - orange is the color of insanity. But I never gave it much thought until I looked at that couch. It wasn’t a little rip or one bad cushion. The fabric was shredded, the wooden frame splintered. Springs pulled so hard they’d gone straight as knitting needles. I have seen some fucked-up shit in that alley, but that couch looked like some four-hundred pound Mongoloid with one eye and a heart full of PCP had come at it with a Samurai sword and just didn’t stop until his arms fell off.
There were candy wrappers and trash piled around it. And there was a roll of dark brown carpet behind it, folded over like a tortilla, with fresh weeds stuck to it. I traced the drag marks, which formed a long trail, and noticed tire tracks, fat and wide patches of bald dirt where someone had skidded. Another twenty feet back, on the other side of the garage, the weeds had gone dead-fish white from being covered for months.
I walked to the carpet and my hand just reached down and pulled it off, easy as pulling a clean flat sheet from a mattress. I stared down at the broken body and the face with the eye looking at me, and the weeds and sludge layers of caked purple blood in her snow-blonde hair and it settled on me, a heavy black pair of stinking leather wings that embedded themselves, becoming a part of me.
‘Oh, sweetie.’ I fell to my knees beside her. I began to brush the road from her hair. ‘Oh, my sweet girl . . .’
I was afraid to touch her and hurt her. Make her worse. But I couldn’t leave her. I pushed my hands under her back and legs and scooped her in my arms. I carried the woman I had known since fourth grade through the garage and over the yard. I held her until we were inside, where I rested her on the couch. The house was empty, ten thousand miles from civilization. I made a support of the pillow under her head and pulled a blanket up to her neck and I kissed her. We were sixteen the first time we kissed and never had made the decisions that brought us here. I lowered my face onto her stomach and it went through me like cold blades.
There was a sound in the air, like a tea kettle reaching steam. For a minute I thought it was the sirens, but there were no sirens. It was just this awful high-pitched piping sound, a screaming coming through the walls, closer and closer until it was drilling into my ears. It made me sick and I ran from her, into the kitchen, where I bent over the sink and heaved until my legs gave out.
Time was no longer slipping. At this point it was scattering like sheets of dirty newspaper in a high-velocity wind tunnel.
I lost track of things. A lot of things.
What I remember next is being in the upstairs bathroom. I was looking up at the paintings of the rabbits on the bathroom wall, Stacey’s rabbits, the morose paintings she loved, God knows why, and then I was reeling away and running into the hall, back down the stairs and I might have been screaming for somebody to help me. I needed to call somebody. The little red Motorola she had given me for my birthday was sitting on the dining-room table, not fifteen feet from the sun room where I had been working all afternoon. I rarely checked this phone. I was always busy checking The Leash. That’s what she called the BlackBerry phone Ghost, Inc. used to communicate with me. I opened my red cell and started to dial 9-1-1 and that’s when the little voicemail envelope popped up on the screen.
You have one voice message.
I stood there wondering if I could go back in time. I was afraid to turn around and see her on the couch. Everything in me slowed and I listened to the message she had left me at 9.12 a.m., almost ten hours earlier.
I don’t know why she hadn’t called the home phone. Maybe she was in a panic. Maybe a darker thing inside her didn’t really want me to answer. But she left me the message, probably sitting in her car, right before she backed out of the garage. She had to have been sitting there, because she never got past the alley and if she had been in the house she would have talked to me face to face. I’d have heard her crying. She was crying so hard and I was sleeping on the couch, less than a hundred feet away from her. Did I hear it ring? I might have. I might have heard it and rolled over, pulling a pillow over my head and going back to sleep while she was begging.
‘Where are you? James, where are you? You’re never home and I’m so scared, I can’t, I can’t, I don’t understand what’s happening any more. I . . .’ Her crying faded for a few more seconds and then the message ended.
She must have started to back out then. I don’t know who or what gave her pause. All I know is who didn’t stop her that morning, the night before, and all the nights when she was drifting toward oblivion - the man who had made a vow to protect her for the rest of her life.
So, my wife didn’t really leave me, is the thing to remember. I left her, not the other way around.
I left my little rabbit all alone.
The detective who worked Stacey’s case, Tod Bergen, took me for a drink a couple weeks after. He was a burly guy with tight hair and a pink face behind clear-framed glasses, a near-albino you might find managing a Swedish furniture boutique. He was a good cop as far as I could tell, and a smart one. He’d been on the job for sixteen years, said this kind of thing happened in Los Angeles more often than anyone wanted to admit. Ten million people. Too many cars. Enough pedestrians and cyclists thrown in to keep things interesting. You’d think with so many people crammed into so few square miles, there’d always be a witness.
But this was not so, Bergen explained while I sat beside him at the bar, numb and mute with contempt for everything that breathed. ‘Last year we worked a case up in Bel Air. Male jogger, fifty-eight, not the guy on top of the studio, but one of the big guys in line. He was run over by a Corolla, both the car and the jogger abandoned. Mr Mogul’d been lying under the Toyota for two days when someone finally called to have the car towed. They don’t like Corollas in Bel Air. The driver had it attached to his wrecker before he noticed the running shoe . . .’
‘She was accepting,’ I said. My head felt like the machine that turns cabbage into coleslaw. ‘I keep trying to find the right word to describe her. I should know by now. But accepting is the only one I can think of.’
‘Well, it happens,’ Bergen said. ‘That’s all I’m saying. You can’t look for a reason, or blame yourself. Don’t even start down that road, son.’
‘She accepted me. She accepted this life. The whole world.’
‘That’s a rare quality,’ Bergen said.
The takeaway - she had stepped into the alley at the wrong time. Maybe she was saving a cat or picking up trash. Maybe a drunk behind the wheel, some working stiff coming off the third shift. The severity of the damage to her torso suggested a truck, but no one saw a truck, if that’s what it was. No one heard the brakes. No one saw a fucking thing.
Maybe if we had leaked my connection with Ghost to the press, we would have come up with something. But his people and the police advised against this, suggesting it would only clutter the phone lines with bullshit tips, a bunch of loonies trying to get in on the excitement. Stacey’s parents blamed me, and left me out of their own investigations, if they pursued any. Her father, Roy, was just broken, reduced to a shard of dry chalk. Linda, her mother, told me I deserved to rot in hell, which I guess I did. My parents, both older, retired evangelicals back in Oklahoma City, had written me off years ago. My mother said I had sold my soul to Satan, which I guess I had. I didn’t want it to become a tabloid item, one of those forty-word snippets in
US Weekly
: Celeb Lookalike Loses Wife. I didn’t fight this advice to let it go. I wonder now if that was a mistake.