provide you a mental projection again, like I did last night?
“Is that what I saw?” Penelope whispered. “A mental projection?”
Don’t know what else to call it, said Jack.
“How about a hallucination?”
What a pill, Jack thought to himself. Okay, baby. Time to play hardball.
Turn off the lights again, he told her with the equivalent of a low rasp in her ear. He swirled himself silently around her, taking pleasure in the way goose bumps formed on the surface of her skin, and her ample breasts rose and fell with quickening breaths. I dare you . . .
“No!” Penelope said, even as shivers ran through her, giving her the startling revelation that he could manifest signs of his physical presence. “I can’t feel you. I can’t.”
You can. It’s me. He breezed by her again, and again she shivered, shutting her pretty copper eyes, the dark lashes brushing her pale cheeks in a way that made Jack even more restless.
“You go away now,” she said.
Jack laughed.
“I mean it.”
He laughed again.
Penelope stood up, her small hands balling into fists. She released a breath, then opened her eyes and grabbed up her clunky black glasses, shoving them on her face like armor.
“Get out of my head!” she cried. “Get out of my store!”
Calm down, baby. You’re in no danger. At least not yet—and I’m only bothering you now because I’d like to keep it that way for you and yours. Get me?
Jack backed away, letting the air around her warm again. Penelope took a deep breath. “You’re trying to protect me? And my family?”
Ready to open an eardrum now?
“Fine,” she said, sinking slowly back into her chair. “Proceed.”
First let’s get some things out of the way. I can’t stand it when broads pretend I’m not wise to things. It’s time to put the cards on the table. I want you to know what I know about you.
“What do you know about me?”
Everything. You’re a widow, that’s easy, but you haven’t let a living soul know how you really felt about your husband. Maybe not even yourself.
“Okay, I’ll bite. How do I feel?”
You didn’t love him.
“How dare you—”
Save the energy, doll. Hubby leaped from an Upper East Side high-rise. You even glimpsed the guy taking the big plunge when you opened the bedroom door unexpectedly. And, after the initial shock over the man’s sad end, you felt mainly one thing: worry for your son’s well-being. And that was it. You’re sorry for the way he died, but you don’t miss him in the least.
“I won’t dignify that with an answer.”
Don’t. We both know it’s true. And we both know why.
“Oh, WE both know, do we?”
You were trying to raise a little boy with dragon-hearted in-laws breathing down your neck, and your mealy-mouthed man giving you a manifesto that read something like he found fatherhood a bore. How’m I doing?
Penelope sat very still.
He stopped sleeping with you, too, Jack continued. And no matter what you did, what you said to try to help him, or get him help, the sap refused to make the least bit of effort to find a way out of the well. That is, until he took the coward’s way out. Or should I say down. All the way to the bottom and six feet under. That about cover it?
After a long pause, Penelope whispered, “It’s all true. Yes.”
So that clinical depression checklist you’re going through isn’t for you, is it?
“No.”
It’s for Calvin, right?
“I should have done it when it mattered. For a solid month he told me he was looking for a better therapist, that his old one was a quack. He kept telling me he was taking his medicine.”
But he wasn’t. On either count.
“That’s right. And he was—”
Get it out, sister.
“Weak. Calvin was weak, which meant he could also be mean. He never struck me, but when he didn’t get his way, he could be abusive . . . verbally abusive.”
So you distanced yourself.
“That’s a nice way of putting it. What I did was give up on him . . . and the truth is I was close to leaving him.”
But he left you first.
“Yes.”
So you blame yourself.
“Of course I blame myself. I was his wife.”
Listen, I got a story for you, one of my cases. A wife comes in one day to hire me as a tail for her husband. Pretty little thing. Had a baby at home. Said her husband was an alkie. He’d have a bad week, get bombed on Friday, sleep with whatever had a pulse, then drag home again about Sunday. Swear he’d never do it again. Promised he’d get help to kick the booze. The week would go by. Come Friday, he was in the bar, knocking them back. So . . . what do you think?
“What do I think? Of what?”
Of the wife? How many years should the authorities have put her in prison for . . . I mean for the terrible crime of not getting her husband to sober up and stop treating her like dirt?
“It wasn’t the wife’s fault.”
My point exactly, doll.
“No. My situation was not the same as hers. Calvin was sick. He was depressed. I know back in your time, society didn’t recognize depression as a disease—alcoholism, either, for that matter. But these things are sicknesses. People can’t kick them on their own. They need help.”
Which you tell me you tried to get him. But he refused.
“I could have committed him.”
Would his family have let you?
“Probably not. They didn’t see Calvin the way I did. He showed them a different face, and he’d never said anything about suicide—not to me, anyway. He’d even rallied the week before. Started organizing things, seemed more upbeat.”
You didn’t PUSH him out the window, did you?
“No, of course not. Although sometimes the way his family looks at me—I think they wonder if I did.”
Screw them. Him, too. And I don’t mean maybe, baby, he’s the one that bailed. All that counts now is you and your son. You’re in it together. Isn’t that what you told the kid this morning?
There was a long pause. “You were there this morning? With us? In Spencer’s room? You heard me say that?”
So anyway, sugar, let’s get back to that syringe in your ladies’—
“Oh, no you don’t. I want you to answer my question. Were you spying on us? On me? Upstairs in our private rooms?”
I like to think of it as surveillance.
“Well, I forbid you to go up there again.”
Lady, you can’t lay down house rules to a man with no body.
“I can so! I can ask you to promise not to haunt the second floor, on your honor as a . . . as a spirit.”
Forget it.
