The Wives

TWENTY-ONE

I am alone. I realize that it’s always been this way, my whole life, and anything my mind constructed to convince me otherwise was a lie. A comfortable lie I needed. My parents were occupied with my sister, Torrence, who was always getting into trouble at school or with her friends. I was the good child; I parented myself well while they were busy. I knew the rules, the moral confines they’d built around me: no drinking, no premarital sex, no drugs, no sneaking out, top-notch grades only. It was easy to follow their guidelines; I wasn’t the rebel of the family. My sister, on the other hand, dabbled in all of the above. My father grayed at his temples, my mother started getting Botox and I tried my best to be perfect so there was one less daughter to worry about. Then, when Torrence straightened up and married the right man, they’d been so relieved they’d showered her with a different type of attention. She’d put in three well-behaved years and they’d both forgotten the decade she spent snorting their money up her nose and fucking every dealer in town. Maybe all of that trying made me go crazy. Maybe the lack of attention from my parents pushed me toward Seth, my desperation to be accepted trapping me in a relationship any normal person would think bizarre.

I poke at my Jell-O. They love to feed you Jell-O in this place—wobbly and colorful, like our minds. Today is orange, yesterday was green. It’s like they’re trying to remind you that you’re weak and unstable. I eat my Jell-O.

I have to get the fuck out of here. I have to find Hannah, make sure she’s okay. Where once I slept, I am now awake. I saw Dr. Steinbridge today. I’ve realized that he is my keeper—not the electric doors with keycard access, nor the burly nurses who wrangle us like toddlers if we get out of hand. Calm down, little Thursday, or we’ll put you in the padded time-out room.

Dr. Steinbridge has the power to say I’m well; he is God in this place of speckled sterile tile and fluorescent lights. One swipe of his pen (a Bic) and I am a free bird.

Hannah... Hannah. She’s all I think about. I’ve become her savior in my own mind. If something has happened to her, I am responsible. If she is to be saved, I must get out of here. I married this man, gave my blessing for a third wife. When I saw that first bruise I should have spoken up, forced her to tell me what he did. For a moment, I doubt that she is real. That’s how good they are—they can make you doubt your own mind in this place.

Eat your Jell-O!

I realize it is my duty to convince the good doctor that I have come to my senses, that my head is cleared of its delusional fog. That I am whole and my husband is a one-woman man! That Hannah and Regina are not real, but a sexual game my husband and I played. That’s what they want to hear, isn’t it? All I have to do is say I’m lying about Seth’s penchant for plural pussy and I am a cured woman!

It can’t happen too fast, my change, or Steinbridge will suspect that I am lying. During our daily sessions, I pretend to be confused. Seth only has one wife? That wife is me? Gradually, I become more myself, each session I am less confused, less insistent.

“What is wrong with me?” I ask the doctor. “Why don’t I know what’s real and what is not?”

I am diagnosed! The trauma of losing a child, never dealing with that loss in a healthy way, it put stress on my relationship with Seth. I blamed other women instead of focusing on my healing. When the good doctor asked what I thought triggered the mania that led to my mental demise, I thought of Debbie: chatty Debbie, nosy Debbie, Debbie with the big hair who suggested I snoop on the women who made me feel insecure. I don’t blame Debbie for any of my actions; if anything, she woke me up. I wasn’t the only one who suffered crippling insecurity, you could be any age. Hell, Lauren seemingly had a perfect life. I always thought she taped those anniversary cards to her locker to brag, to rub it in the rest of our faces that she had it better than us. But now I see the truth: women are stuck in a cycle of insecurity perpetuated by the way men treat them, and we are constantly fighting to prove to ourselves and everyone else that we are okay. Sure, women occasionally lose their minds over men, but does that mean we’re all unstable, or that men made us unstable with their careless actions? I don’t tell Dr. Steinbridge about Debbie or Lauren; he would say I was deferring responsibility. But that’s not what I’m doing at all; I’m holding everyone accountable, because it takes a village to put someone in a mental institution.

My lack of dealing with issues is part of my unraveling, according to Dr. Steinbridge. I like the way that sounds: my unraveling.

But I’m not unraveling in the way they think I am; I’m unraveling out of my infatuation with my husband. I play the part of frail, painfully unaware woman. Stress has eaten at me, I have no coping mechanisms, my parents’ lack of attention coddled me into a tight, naive little cocoon.

We take a tour of my daddy/mommy issues. My mother is a pleaser and my father is detached. As I watched my mother do more, more, more to earn my father’s attention...well...I learned to express that love language. And when I do too much, I collapse under the weight of expectations. My empty womb has made me feel like I’m not a real woman, not worthy of my husband’s love. They scraped all of my organs out, roped off my reproductive system: closed for business. Before my eyes, scenes from my miscarriage begin to flash in painful succession. I know I’m supposed to let them come, face them—as the doctor says. But they’re memories I’ve never looked over, not even once, since it happened. It’s easier to cope when you don’t acknowledge what you’re coping from.

Seth and I have just left our bed and breakfast, and we stop at a gas station to fill up and buy snacks for the road. We’ve just eaten but he insists the baby will need snacks, which makes me smile. He’s so attentive: buying little gifts and kissing my swelling belly. One of my friends at the hospital told me that her husband is revolted by her pregnant stomach and refuses to touch it. I watch him through the car window, my heart swollen with pride. My husband, mine. And now we’ve made a baby together; my life couldn’t be more perfect. He’s so handsome as he walks toward the car, carrying two paper cups, a plastic bag hanging from his forearm. The cups hold tea; he says he asked for hot water inside and then used his mother’s tea bags. It’s bitter, but I’ve been drinking it for a week and the taste is growing on me. I dig in the bag while he finishes up with the gas. He’s bought my favorite pregnancy snacks: unhealthy, processed garbage that normally make me blush with shame. But as I sip on my tea and pull things out of the bag, I feel only grateful for my thoughtful, observant husband. So sweet are the ranch-flavored chips and licorice sticks that resembled twisted, red plastic. The cramps start an hour and a half later. I don’t want to say anything at first, remembering that my doctor said that some women experience Braxton Hicks contractions early in their pregnancies. The phantom pains a mere reflection of what is to come. I squirm uncomfortably in my seat, my open bag of chips falling to the car’s floorboard, little speckled triangles spilling out around my shoes. It’s not until I bend to retrieve the chip bag that I see the blood. It’s pooling on the tan leather, staining my cream pants in a dark, ominous red. “Seth,” is all I have to say. He looks over at me and pushes his foot down on the gas, his face pale at the sight of the blood. The nearest hospital: Queen County. When we pull up at the doors of the emergency room I already know my baby is dead, his life leaking out from between my legs.

Everything from there I could only recount in a sort of dizziness that was colored by fluorescent lights. The first time I had clarity of mind after the car ride to the hospital was five days later when they told me that my uterus had ruptured and in order to control the bleeding they’d had to remove it in an emergency surgery. I would never be able to become pregnant again. I’d let Seth hold me as I sobbed into his shirt, and then when he’d left to take a call from work, I’d gone to the tiny bathroom in my room and attempted to slit my wrists with a metal nail file. A nurse found me bleeding on the floor, staring at the blood, perfectly calm. It was a hack job, my wrists sawed open with something dull. The scars are thick and lumpy. I’d been calm until they tried to help me, then I scratched, and bit, and screamed that they’d killed my baby and were trying to kill me. That had been the start of my first stay at Queen County. The stay that had left me barren of womb and heart.

Dr. Steinbridge says that, in my grief, I created the delusion of three wives—women who were better suited for Seth, ones who could give him what I could not. God, it’s depressing all the things that are wrong with me—even if only half of them are true.

I shuffle out of our sessions, my head ducked low, the scars on my wrists throbbing. I’m believably pathetic. He thinks I’m getting well. But in those bent-shoulder moments when I look my most humble, I am angry. Where is Seth? Why hasn’t he come? He wasn’t like this when I carried his baby—he was pandering, and catered to my every whim. Does he even feel guilty that he lied?

I’ve been jettisoned. I fume all the way back to my room, which is too cold despite the various complaints I’ve made with the nurses. My roommate is a woman in her late forties named Susan, who had a mental breakdown after she caught her husband having an affair. Weak Susan, I want to say. Try signing off on two extra marriages and being the forgotten middle wife.

Susan has no eyelashes or eyebrows. I’ve seen her searching for them when she’s anxious, thin fingers reaching up like tweezers to pluck. She has a bald spot on top of her head, too, and a scattering of long brown hairs around her bed. I imagine by the time she gets out of here she’ll be completely hairless, like one of those cats.

She’s not in the room. I lie down on the bed, my arm thrown across my eyes to block out the light because we aren’t allowed to turn off our lights during the day. I am drifting off into a semi-nap—which is the best you can do in this place—when a nurse comes in to tell me that I have a visitor.

My eyes snap open and my first thought is: I’m going to pretend not to be angry with him. That’s right. I’ll be docile and apologetic—the Suzy-homemaker type of wife he likes me to be. It won’t be so hard, will it? I’ve been pretending for years, the anger bubbling under the surface, unexplored. You’re awake, I think. Do not lose grip of your awakeness.

I stand up, alert and ready. There is no mirror to check my reflection in—mirrors are slit wrists waiting to happen—so I smooth my hair, wipe beneath my eyes. I have no idea what I look like, but I suppose the more pathetic, the better. When I run my hands down my abdomen, there is only a hollow and then two sharp knobs of hipbone that used to be buried underneath my bad habits of wine and cheesy pastas. I stick out my chest, which, thankfully, has not diminished. I have to get my husband on my side.

When I walk into the common area, it’s not Seth I see, but Lauren. I feel a sense of disappointment. This is different than what was supposed to happen. I rearrange my face, hiding what I’m really feeling to smile at pain-in-the-ass Lauren. Lauren, whom I had drinks with, and told all my secrets to. Were we friends now?

I don’t know if I’m happy to see her, but she’s certainly happy to see me. She stands up from the table where she’s been waiting and I see that she’s wearing jeans and a Seahawks sweatshirt. Her face is contorted with concern as she makes her way over to me, dodging a woman who is doing interpretive dance in the center of the room. The place between her eyebrows is pinched.

“Thursday,” she breathes, shaking her head. “What the hell?”

I like her so much in that moment that my little act of contrite humility I had ready for Seth drops away, and I latch on to her in a desperate hug. My moods, my thoughts, they’re all over the place. I’m like a spider monkey, clinging in my relief to someone I know.

Lauren lets out a little yelp and I realize I’m strangling her, so I let go. She smiles at me in the way that old friends smile after something bad has happened to you. She already believes me, I can tell. I do have a friend.

“How did you find me?” I ask, breathless with anticipation.

“Your husband called the hospital—Seth, right?—and said that you’d be taking extended time off due to an illness. I tried to get in touch with him but we don’t have a number. So, I called your mother—she’s listed on your emergency contacts—and she told me where to find you.”

I’m surprised that my mother admitted to a stranger that her daughter was in a mental hospital. Lauren had put in a lot of work to find me. I wonder if Anna’s noticed that I’ve been missing, if she’s reached out to my mother.

“Why are you here?” she says finally, once we’ve settled down in a spot by the window. The glass is streaked with water as an unusually hard rain leans east, slapping the glass and bending the trees. A woman’s hair whips around her as she runs through the garden area below. As I lean into Lauren, a mother/son duo walk toward us, eyeing the empty chairs in our circle. I shoot them a vicious look and they scoot away somewhere else. Good. Go.

I tell her about going to see Hannah, and about finding Regina online. When I get to the part about Hannah’s bruise, Lauren’s eyes bug out. Another convoluted detail to add to this story. I tell her how Seth pushed me while we were arguing.

“I confronted him about all of it. He says I attacked him, that I fell and hit my head. When I woke up, I was here. Lauren...” I say, lowering my voice. “He’s saying that I made it all up.”

Her face is horrified. Her life is a mess, but mine is messier.

“That you made what up?”

“His polygamy. He has everyone convinced I’m crazy, including my own mother.” I’m rubbing a piece of hair between my fingers and I abruptly stop, in case I look crazy.

Lauren doesn’t seem to notice. Her eyes drop to the ground as she thinks.

“If everyone close to you is saying the same thing, they’ll never believe you,” she says. “You know how this stuff works.”

I know.

“What about your friends? Is there someone I can call to come in here and back you up?” Her hands are splayed flat on her knees with just the pointer finger of her right hand moving up and down in quick succession. A nervous finger, I think.

“No,” I say. “I’ve never told anyone aside from you. Not even my sister knows.”

“Not a close family, huh? Sounds like mine.”

“We’re close without being close, if you know what I mean. We see each other often, but no one really knows what’s happening behind everyone’s eyes.”

Lauren nods like she knows exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe all American families play the togetherness game—the one where you talk about sports and dine on casseroles (in the Pacific Northwest, it’s gluten-free and organic), fight about politics and act like you have meaningful relationships when you’re actually dying of loneliness.

“I don’t know if she’s okay,” I say of Hannah. “She was off the last time I saw her. She called me the next day, but when I called her back, she didn’t answer.”

“Maybe I can contact her,” Lauren suggests. “Does she have a Facebook or something?”

I give her all of Hannah’s details. I remember her address off the top of my head but not her phone number.

“Do you know where he met this girl?” she asks me as I walk her to the doors.

I shake my head. In all my detective work, I hadn’t asked Hannah where she met her husband, though I doubt she would have told me the truth.

“There’s a photo,” I say quickly. “On Regina’s dating profile. I think Hannah and Regina know each other.”

Lauren is startled; the plot has thickened. “Wait,” she whispers. “Seth’s other two wives know each other?”

I nod. “If you can find that photo we have proof. We can take it to Regina, make her talk...”

My plan is faulty. Thinking that Regina would come forward to back me up is far-fetched. Thinking that a photo could prove my claim that Seth is a polygamist is equally as far-fetched. But it’s all I have. I could blackmail them.

Lauren promises to come back as soon as she has something, and I feel such immense relief that I hug her once more.

“Lauren,” I say before she leaves. “You have no idea how much this means to me. I haven’t even asked how you are...”

“Yeah, well, in light of your current situation, you get a free pass.”

I smile at her gratefully before she turns in her visitor badge to the security desk and gives me a little wave. “I’ll be back soon,” she promises.

I walk back to my room, a renewed hope growing in my chest. I’m not alone. Seth wants me to believe that I am. He’s taken my mother...my father. He wants me to be solely reliant on him. But I’m not sure why. I became a liability when I snooped after he told me not to. I know things that could ruin his business, his reputation. Of course he wants to shut me up, lock me up.

What if...? What if Hannah doesn’t know about me? Maybe that’s it. All along I’ve thought that all three of us were in cahoots, like some secret girl alliance. Our man is so lovable he scored three women, and we’re just so happy to be a part of it! But Seth is going to great lengths to keep me locked away, sequestered. Perhaps to keep me from Hannah. To keep her from finding out. I think of the photo on Regina’s dating profile, the blond in the corner of the photo who looked suspiciously like Hannah. What if Seth used the same story on Hannah that he used on me? The barren wife, the need to be with someone who would give him children... I could be removed from the equation altogether...so Seth could once again get what he wants.