Page 22 of The Therapist
THIRTEEN
Mike
He locks up the house, checking the back door and the front door twice as the rain ramps up and dies down. Out in the back garden, the scooters and bicycles are rusting in the rain but he can’t be bothered squelching through the downpour to pick them up.
Near the front door, he glances anxiously up at the ceiling, noting that there is a bubble forming, meaning that there’s a leak.
‘Shit,’ he mutters. Roof leaks can cost a fortune to fix.
He grabs a bucket to put under the bubble in case it bursts and checks the front door again.
He’s already checked everything but he’s anxious, and when his anxiety kicks in, he has to keep checking things, keep taking care of the things he can control.
And then he gets a rag out and some bleach and goes to wipe the red streak on the white wall by the front door. Lana saw it. He knows she did. And now he knows exactly what she must think.
‘It’s my blood,’ he would like to tell her.
But there’s no way she would believe him because no one is going to believe him.
Three months ago, maybe more, he and Sandy had a fight late one Saturday night.
He was drinking and she was drinking and when her bottle of wine was empty, she hissed, ‘I hate you,’ and lobbed it at him, hitting him in the face.
His nose started bleeding and he turned and left, grabbing tissues and going out of the front door, knowing that he needed to give her an hour to fall asleep before things got even worse.
He thought he had cleaned up all the blood but he obviously missed some that dried and stained and now Lana has seen it.
Add to that the screenshot on his phone of an email, an email that he never received. Did he? And why is the screenshot on his phone? When would Sandy have had access to his phone?
Last night, after their vicious argument, Sandy slept in their bedroom and he passed out on the sofa.
This morning, she kicked the sofa hard to wake him and said, ‘You take the kids to school,’ and he knew better than to argue.
She left him in the kitchen with them and he heard the bedroom door slam and then the sound of water running through the pipes, meaning she was taking a shower. He hasn’t heard from her since then.
He looks through his emails, trying to see if there’s one from Sandy asking for a divorce, but there isn’t one and he knew there wouldn’t be.
That’s not the kind of email he would have missed.
So how did she get the screenshot onto his phone?
His code to unlock the phone is the kids’ birthdays, which Sandy knows.
He doesn’t know how to unlock her phone, but he’s never cared.
He picks up some dirty plates to take to the kitchen, wondering exactly how he got here.
He knows he’s one of the few people in his friendship group from school who’s married. The rest of them are still single, still playing the field and enjoying every minute of it.
All week, since the appointment with Lana, he has thought about how to extricate himself from his marriage and his toxic wife. He imagined she was thinking exactly the same thing.
At some point during yesterday’s argument he yelled, ‘You don’t want to be a better person, Sandy. If you did, you wouldn’t have lied to your therapist like a psychopath.’
And she screamed back, ‘You’re the one who lied, Mike – you can’t hide what you are anymore. The whole world is going to know just what a monster I have had to live with.’
They would have gone on throwing hate at each other but then Felix appeared. ‘It’s bath time,’ he whispered, his little face pale and his blue eyes wide with fear.
‘Fabulous, how fabulous. Why don’t I take care of this like I do everything else? You drink yourself to sleep,’ Sandy said, throwing up her hands, and she stormed upstairs.
And then today, Sandy disappears, just up and disappears, and he can’t help wondering if it’s for the best. It’s a shame that the therapist is involved because Mike can see that the woman is unlikely to let things go.
Did he manage to plant even the smallest seed of doubt in her brain?
If he was a woman with injuries like the ones he showed Lana, there would be no hesitation from those around him to offer support.
But he has to admit that if a mate of his came to him with the same story, he would find it unbelievable.
And the blood on the wall is a problem. But it’s gone now, and only a slightly whiter patch on the wall shows that something was there.
Maybe he should paint over that? No, that would look way too suspicious.
The screenshot is a problem as well so he opens his phone and deletes it and then empties the trash so that it’s really gone although nothing is ever really gone.
He returns everything to the kitchen along with the plates and goes to the single garage to check if Sandy’s car is still there and of course it is.
They are a thirty-minute walk from the nearest train station.
Leaning against the kitchen counter, he opens the banking app, checking their shared account.
If she had taken a cab or an Uber, it would have shown up on the credit card but it hasn’t.
Neither has a charge for a hotel or motel, not that Sandy would ever stay at a motel.
He checks their small savings account but that hasn’t been touched either.
As he prepares a dinner of fish fingers and oven chips for the kids, he tries Sandy’s phone a few times, leaving messages just like he did this afternoon after the school called. He knows there’s no point but it feels necessary to leave the messages.
‘Hi Sandy, please call me back.’
‘Hey Sandy, I know that you’re taking some time, but the kids really need you here.’
‘Sandy, please just call me so I know you’re okay.’
‘Can you please call me back? This is not fair to me or the kids.’
Her mailbox will fill up quickly at this rate but he needs to keep trying.
He checks the credit card and their bank account again, in case something has happened in the last few minutes, but nothing has been touched.
When dinner is ready, he calls the kids.
‘Can we eat in front of the TV?’ asks Lila because if anyone can sense a chink in his armour it’s his five-year-old daughter.
‘Yes.’ He takes their plates to the coffee table in the living room and makes sure they have water as well. ‘If you argue about what to watch, I’ll turn it off,’ he warns them.
‘I’m not…’ starts Felix because he regards Lila’s television programmes as ‘for babies’.
‘We can watch the Daniel Tiger one,’ says Lila quickly because she knows Felix loves the show. Mike finds it for them and puts it on, and then he leaves them to it, taking a beer from the fridge in the kitchen and draining it quickly, needing to get to the next one.
After his third beer, he makes himself some toast to eat because he can’t be bothered cooking anything. He needs to get the kids into their bath and off to bed but the thought exhausts him and he flirts briefly with the idea of just walking out and going to a pub, but obviously he wouldn’t do that.
Felix and Lila know something is up.
Once he has cajoled the two of them into a bath, he reads Lila a story first and then goes to Felix’s room to read to him. He’s had three beers in quick succession and he’s not even buzzed.
‘When is Mum coming home?’ Felix asks as Mike sits down on the bed.
‘I don’t know. Soon, I hope,’ he replies.
‘Why did she go away?’ Felix asked this question already but Mike knows he will keep asking it because he finds the answer so unsatisfactory.
‘Because she needed a rest. She was tired.’ He’s sticking to the same answer, which he knows is frustrating for his son. It’s frustrating as hell for him too. Sandy will be back tomorrow, of course she will be. Won’t she?
‘But why is she so tired?’
‘I don’t know, mate; she needed a break.’
‘But mums don’t need a break from their kids. They’re mums.’ Felix picks up his soft toy koala and holds it close to him. Mike wants to tell him he’s too big for the toy but he lets the thought go. He can deal with that another day. Who knows how much Felix will need the toy over the coming months.
‘Sometimes they do. Now it’s time for reading.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Mike wants to tell him that he doesn’t understand either, that he is as confused as a seven-year-old boy because none of this should have happened.
‘Where are we up to in your book?’ he asks, hoping to distract his son from his line of questioning.
‘The part where the children run away,’ says Felix and then he is quiet. He taps his finger on the book. ‘Did Mum run away?’ he asks.
‘No, no, mate, she didn’t,’ Mike replies firmly.
Maybe Felix is right. Maybe Sandy did run away. He hasn’t checked their closets. He’ll do that next, when the kids are asleep.
After two requests for water and one more story for Lila, it’s after 9 p.m. but the house is finally silent and Mike is exhausted.
He has to drop the kids at school early tomorrow morning so he can get to work on time and it takes them ages to get ready.
He’s forgotten to pack lunches and do whatever else needs to be done.
The laundry pile seems to have grown in the few hours they’ve been home and the house is a mess but he doesn’t have the energy for any of it.
The temptation to stay home from work tomorrow is overwhelming but Mike needs his last pay cheque. Everyone does. And it feels like that may not come to him if he’s not there.
In their bedroom, he goes to Sandy’s closet and pushes aside her clothes, trying to figure out if stuff is missing, but it’s still jammed full.
He has no real idea if she has taken anything or not.
He feels a surge of fury when he comes across a black jumpsuit with the price tag still on: four hundred dollars.
No wonder he always feels like he can’t get ahead.
He’s talked to her more than once about her spending habits but it seems to make no difference to her at all.
Exhaustion creeps up from his toes. He needs to shower and sleep.
He stands in the shower for a long time, trying to work out a way forward. Until Sandy returns, he can do nothing. Will she return? Does he want her to come back? Despite how hard it is to deal with the kids, the house is, at least, peaceful without her here.
When he’s in bed he switches off the light and stares into the dark until he understands that sleep is far away. He’s too wired.
He climbs out of bed and lifts the mattress, taking the phone out from underneath, the phone he found there this afternoon when he walked into the bedroom, calling his wife. It was charging so it has a full battery.
As he found it, the doorbell rang and Lana was there so he didn’t have time to look at it properly.
All he could do was turn it to silent to make sure it couldn’t be heard.
But he studies it now. There are lots of missed calls listed on the screen, from him, from the therapist, from the school, from Sandy’s friend Emma.
He tries a few lock patterns, knowing that he will probably never guess what Sandy has used, but he keeps going until the phone locks him out of trying again, so he throws it back under the mattress and gets back into bed.
If the therapist tells the police, the first thing they will do is trace Sandy’s phone. How long does that take to do? Why did she leave it? She’s glued to the thing all day long. Should he have taken it to the police or given it to the therapist? No way.
‘Has Mum run away?’ his son asked him and what Mike is hoping is that she realises that she shouldn’t have left, that her conscience pricks at her and she comes home and then he’ll tell her they need to get divorced because he’s not staying in this marriage for one moment longer, but in order to start the process of divorce, his wife needs to turn up.
And she will turn up if she has chosen to leave, if she hasn’t been forced to go, but by who? And if she’s not hurt, but also, by who? And if she wants to come back.
That’s a lot of ifs, Mike , he tells himself. A lot of ifs.