The Housewife(42)

The letter isn’t there.

I press the heel of my hands against my eyes.

If you held up a mirror to yourself, you know what the mirror would tell you?

I’m never going to find anything because I’m too stupid, and Roy’s not, and he knows how to hide things, and I’ve been looking for so long, I am a rat trapped in a maze desperately looking for the way out, except there’s no way out. Just a whole lot of dead ends.

I take a breath, pick up the folders to put them back in the safe, and that’s when I notice another USB thumb drive at the bottom. It must have fallen out of one of the folders. Unfortunately, this is just the detail that Roy would notice. I can just picture him, finger waving in my face. Did you go into my safe? Did you?

I plug it in, hoping to get a first name at least so I can return it to its rightful folder, and click on the video thumbnail.

“Just put the camera away.”

I jerk back like I’ve been burnt.

It’s Deborah.

“Look at me,” Roy says.

She was facing away from the camera. She turns slowly and looks at him from under hooded eyes. “What the hell are you doing to me?”

I feel a wave of vertigo as I freeze the frame and stare at her face. She’s not wearing any makeup and her hair is messy, like she hasn’t brushed it in days. She still looks beautiful, but her eyes are rimmed red and there are purple, papery half-moons under them.

And she looks older. A lot older.

I zoom in on the swellings, the slight drooping on the left side of her mouth, the strange wrinkle at her right cheekbone, the way the skin is pulled down in places .

I touch my own face, feel the bump under my eye, the strange wrinkle on my top lip.

I start the video again.

“I’m trying to help you,” Roy says off-camera.

She turns her face away. “Then let me out of here.”

I pause the video again. This time, I focus on the room. Where are they? Not here, that’s for sure. The room is dim and Deb is sitting on a single bed. Behind her, the wall is whitewashed, and you can see the slant of a low ceiling and an exposed beam.

So not his office downtown, either.

Roy must have set up his laptop on a table behind him, because you can see the back of him sitting on a wooden chair, his legs crossed, taking notes.

And all I can think is, We never saw her again. She was locking herself inside. For a week.

Where the hell was she?

I start the video again. “Where do you want to go, Deborah?”

She turns back to him, fuming. “Out of here! I want to get out!”

Roy makes a note. “To be with Steve?” His tone is almost normal, like this is a perfectly normal question.

“Oh God. Not that again, please!” Deborah cries. “He’s our gardener! he’s twenty years old! I am just being friendly!”

The gardener? We don’t have a gardener named Steve. There is a Russian woman named Irina who used to be a professional wrestler and is built like one, who comes once a week to mow the lawn and trim the edges. But no one called Steve.

“I fired him,” Roy says matter-of-factly .

Well, there you go.

“Oh God,” Deb says.

“Does that upset you?”

“Yes! No! I don’t know!”

“Did you fuck him?” Roy asks, still matter-of-factly.

“You’re sick,” Deb says. “I can’t anymore. I just can’t.”

“Did you fuck him?”

“Let me go,” she says softly.

Roy closes his notebook on his lap. “You think I want you to stay? Look at you. You’re getting ugly. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately, Deborah?”

“Why are you doing this to me?” she cries.

He opens his notebook again. “Have you heard of factitious disorder, Deborah? You are inducing, fabricating this illness to bring attention to yourself. You create the symptoms because you hate yourself. You are hurting your appearance to match your distorted self-image.”

“Let me out!”

“I can’t do that until you recognize your disease. I’m trying to help you.”

She glares at him. I recognize the fire inside. The fierce determination. “You’re afraid,” she says.

He laughs, but it’s off. “What could I possibly be afraid of?”

“That I’ll tell what a monster you are, that I’ll shatter your precious image…”

He taps the notebook against his thigh. “I’m trying to help you. I can’t let you leave until we have reached the point where you can begin treatment. And that point is where you recognize what you’re doing. There’s no other way. You’ll kill yourself out there on your own.”

“No. That’s not it,” she says softly. “You’re not afraid for me. You’re afraid for you. You’ve started something, you’ve done something to me, and you don’t know how to stop it.” She narrows her eyes. “I’m going to get out of here, and I’m going to go to the police, and I’m going to tell them what you did to me. And no one will look at you the same way again.”

Roy gets up abruptly, and the video goes black.





I press my fists into my eyes. I feel sick. All this time I wanted to find the proof that he killed my sister, and now that I have, I am devastated. I feel like my heart has been ripped out of me. I wipe my face with my sleeve, and that’s when I hear something outside. A footstep. The creak of a door.