Page 30 of The Therapist
Picturing himself on a motorbike riding around Australia and working in bars, a sense of calm settles over him. He can almost feel the rush of the wind as he drives through the vast desert. He’s always wanted to have a motorbike but he’s never had the money to buy one.
‘Dude,’ he hears, ‘dude,’ and he’s jolted back to reality, where a teenage boy with scraggly hair is standing behind the counter, three pizza boxes in front of him.
‘Sorry,’ says Mike, the fantasy evaporating as his real life hits him in the face with the smell of melted cheese.
At home, he lets the kids grab junk food snacks from the pantry even though he knows Sandy says they should have a healthy snack when they come home from school but, Screw that , he thinks. I’m in charge now.
He grabs a beer and sits down at the kitchen table, scrolling through videos until he sees it’s nearly 5.
00 p.m. He has no idea where the time has gone and he goes upstairs to their bedroom to change and is immediately struck by the lingering smell of Sandy’s perfume, as though she has just been here instead of gone for nearly two days.
The floral musky scent is so strong he feels like he’s imagining it. He is compelled to go to the bed, lifting the mattress to check on the phone: it’s still there, right where he left it.
If he knew the lock pattern on Sandy’s phone, he would have read everything on there, gone through her text messages and emails to try and figure out if anything was going on. He’s tried as many combinations as he can think of but after three, the phone freezes up for a few hours.
She could be anywhere with anyone. She could be with another man.
That’s really likely. She likes telling him about the men who flirt with her and once…
a long time ago, he even enjoyed hearing her stories, knowing that she belonged to him.
Maybe she’s met someone and they’ve gone off together.
Maybe Sandy has been having an affair for some time now and that’s where she is.
He finds that the idea of her with someone else doesn’t bother him at all but the idea that she would simply walk out of her children’s lives makes him furious.
What if she never returns and he’s left taking care of the kids? How will he get a job and manage?
Looking around the room, he tries to figure out if anything has changed or if he’s just imagining the smell.
He goes over to her dressing table, lifting her bottle of perfume and spraying it into the air, coughing as it catches in his throat, and then he sits down on the small stool she has there and goes through all her drawers, wondering why he hasn’t thought to do this before.
He should have gone through everything, not just the clothes.
The first drawer contains make-up and face creams, small pots of incredibly expensive creams that make him crazy each time they show up on the credit card statement.
Why hasn’t she taken any of it? Another drawer contains her hairdryer and hairbrushes in different shapes and sizes.
It looks like she’s actually left everything behind.
He opens her jewellery box, a birthday present from him, timber inlaid with a diamond-shaped mother of pearl decal, creating a beautiful multicoloured sheen.
Lifting the lid, he can see that her costume jewellery is still there but her wedding and engagement rings are not.
She wears those every day. If she’d left him, would she have left them behind?
Standing, he goes to the door of the bedroom and listens for the kids but he can only hear the television so they are probably zoned out, staring at the screen. He needs to give them dinner and get them into bed. The hours are getting away from him.
He moves over to Sandy’s bedside table, emptying everything, throwing nail polish and nail files, an article on plastic surgery that she’s torn out of a magazine somewhere, a book on parenting that he scoffs at, all on the bed.
There’s nothing of value. Sighing, he goes to the closet and feels around on the top shelf, coming across a shoe box that he pulls out.
Inside there are two envelopes. Sitting down on the bed, he opens each one.
They are the life insurance policies, one for her and one for him.
Did Sandy really not remember the discussion the two of them had about taking policies out?
She looks after the household bills and the mortgage and he does occasionally just sign stuff when she asks him to, like he did with this.
He remembers her saying, ‘I think we need to have life insurance policies in case something happens to either of us.’ He agreed with that.
Money meant breathing room and stability.
Why did she accuse him of doing this without her knowledge?
‘Felix, stop it, stop it,’ he hears Lila shout and he gives up trying to understand anything, putting everything back and going downstairs before World War III breaks out between his children.
‘I’m doing dinner now, guys,’ he tells them, ‘but if you fight, no pizza. I’ll eat it all myself.’ The kids are instantly quiet.
Should he call the detective back now? The man hasn’t called again but what if he shows up here?
He grabs his own phone from his pocket and googles, ‘How long does it take police to track a phone?’ and spends five minutes lost in the legal intricacies of police tracking phones and needing permission and using cell phone towers as the oven heats up.
It’s not as simple as it’s made out to be, obviously. Mindful of what could happen over the next few days, he deletes his browsing history.
The ideal thing would be if she were dead. Then he would have a hundred thousand dollars to help him manage and that’s a lot of breathing room. Her being dead would actually be the best outcome.