The Venus Fix

Fifty-Four

Alan Leightman sat in the kitchen across the breakfast table from his wife and watched her stir her coffee. Over and over the spoon circled the cup, long after the sugar had dissolved, and all the while tears dripped down her cheeks. He wanted to get up and wipe them away, and with them her pain.

Until the past few months she had not cried often. He could count the times: when her father died and when she’d had her miscarriages, and even then only for a few minutes. She had always been so stoic. She moved past sadness. She had a bigger agenda than her own personal disappointments. She had a Constitution to save. And she’d been saving it, year after year. He was so proud of her. He had been. So proud of her.

But ever since she’d lost the big privacy case and gone on antidepressants, her emotions had been out of whack. Weeping one minute, furiously angry the next. This morning had been no exception. She’d started out angry. Now she was crying. Scared, he’d say, if the word wasn’t so incongruous when used in conjunction with his wife.

How disturbed was she? How badly was the medication affecting her? He couldn’t take his eyes off her stirring the coffee. Over and over. Only someone deeply disturbed became obsessive like that. She needed help. More help than he could give her. How was he going to help her? He had to help her. Because whatever had happened to her was his fault.

“What are you going to do today?” she asked. The spoon did another revolution, the silver stem glinting in the overhead light.

“I need to finalize which criminal lawyer to hire. Adam can’t handle this if it goes to the next stage. I also need to hire a software genius who can figure out how my credit card was charged with visits to those girls’ Web sites on days when I didn’t go there and-”

“Hard to do,” she interrupted. Another revolution.

“What?”

“That will be hard to do.”

“It’s not like you to suggest that it’s a lost cause before we even get started.”

“Did I say it was a lost cause?” Another circle with the spoon.

“I heard it in your voice.”

“It amazes me that you think I’d still be on your side.”

Finally, she laid down the spoon, and he almost cheered. She took a sip of her coffee, then grimaced. “It’s cold.” Getting up, she walked to the sink and poured it down the drain.

She put the kettle on to boil again, and then, standing there, staring down into the flames that were licking up around the black enamel, she said, “No matter which lawyer you hire, the best they can do is figure out a way to get you off, but you do understand it’s too late for you to come out of this totally clean.”

“You’re smiling through your tears, Kira. Does the idea of my humiliation make you that happy?”

“Happy? That your reputation is going to be tarnished? That I’ll be a joke? That our marriage will be exposed as a sham? No, Alan. I’m not happy. Of all the things you could have done to humiliate me, you had to do this? You had to go online? You had to deal with those women? Those women? Alan?” She was screaming. “If you had stopped and thought about it for two minutes, you would have realized it would be the worst thing you could have done to me.” She shook her head and then reached out and touched the pot with her forefinger, pressing her flesh against the kettle as if she were testing to see how cold it was, not how hot.

How could anyone just hold her finger against burning metal like that?

She grimaced, but she didn’t move her finger.

“What the hell are you doing?” Alan yelled as he leapt out of his chair and pulled her hand away.

She struggled with him. “Leave me alone,” she growled.

He backed off.

Kira smiled. Turned back to the stove. Reached out and touched the kettle with her middle finger.

Alan pulled her hand away again and wrestled her away from the stove. She fought him, beating him with small fists that he hardly felt. She was acting crazy. He expected anger and recriminations. Even tears. But she was being irrational.

“Let go of me. You don’t have the right to touch me. Not anymore. Not since you stopped loving me. Not since them. Not since you don’t love me.”

Even her voice, instead of being in the mid-range, was now low and edged with madness.

He let go.

She straightened up, ignoring her fingers, even though, he thought, they must have been throbbing with pain.

He wanted to tell her that he did love her. Had never stopped loving her. No matter what he did online-that was something else. But he knew it wouldn’t make any difference.

“Can’t I do anything, Kira? Won’t you let me help you?”

“Help? Your help?” She giggled. It was unexpected and totally out of context. A six-year-old’s glee escaping in the midst of a forty-five-year-old’s rant. “I’ll survive, but I don’t think you will. I don’t think they’ll find out that someone else logged into your account at those sites. I think they’ll find out you were connected from your own computer. Will that convince them that you were responsible for those women dying? Who knows? The press is on a rampage, Alan. They are all over these murders. They can’t let go of all the salacious details. It’s becoming a media sensation. Just imagine how they will jump all over you once your dirty little secret is out and your name is linked to the Web-cam murders. Your career will be over.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with those girls dying. You know that, don’t you?” He heard his own voice, pleading, begging the one person who had always been on his side to tell him that she still was. “Kira, you can’t think I’m capable of anything like this.”

But to his astonishment and horror-because if she didn’t believe him, would anyone else?-she didn’t give him what he was asking for. She just stared at him, and for those few minutes he did not know if he would be able to ever breathe normally again.

“Kira, do you really think I could have killed those girls?”

“Of course not.”

He started to breathe.

“If I wasn’t your wife, I might even be able to convince them you’re not involved. But I am your wife. Isn’t that the ultimate irony? Even if I could prove it, no one would believe me.”

And then Kira walked out of the room, leaving him sitting there at the table, listening to the kettle shrieking its song.