Page 32 of The Therapist

NINETEEN

TUESDAY NIGHT

Mike

Mike lets the kids eat in front of the television again, because why not?

He sits in the kitchen with a beer and his phone, scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, looking at stupid videos of people falling over. He checks Sandy’s Instagram but she hasn’t posted anything on there.

It’s only Tuesday night but it feels like she’s been gone for a really long time.

Maybe something has actually happened to her. Is that possible? Her car is here so it couldn’t have been an accident.

The police know she’s missing now so they are probably checking the hospitals.

There’s really nothing for him to do but wait.

Surely if they found her, they would call him, although perhaps that’s why the detective left a message for him.

He should call him back right now. But he can’t quite bring himself to do it.

It feels like that will start a chain of events over which he has no control.

Even though he’s done it a few times, Mike checks the credit card purchases again but Sandy hasn’t used it since Sunday afternoon, when she did some online shopping for new bath towels, which have yet to turn up.

‘Stop hitting me, Felix,’ Lila screams and Mike grinds his teeth. He really doesn’t want to have to sort them out. He wants to wipe out this day with beer. But he stands and goes to the living room. ‘Right, no more fighting, bath time for you two,’ he says.

‘Me first, me first,’ shouts Felix. ‘I want bubbles.’

‘I want bubbles too,’ says Lila, jumping up and down, her argument with her brother forgotten.

‘Everyone can have bubbles,’ says Mike.

An hour later, the house is finally quiet and Mike is slumped at the kitchen table, shovelling cold pizza into his mouth in between sips of beer.

Sandy would be horrified at how they are eating.

He’s going to need to get his shit together and start cooking and do some shopping as well.

The fridge is nearly empty because Sandy usually does a big shop on a Monday, and from what he can see, tomorrow he is sending both kids to school with processed crap to eat again.

He’s on his third beer when his phone rings. It’s his mother, and he considers not answering it, just letting it go to voicemail, but she doesn’t call often so he worries when she does.

‘Mum?’

‘Sweetheart,’ she says.

‘Everything okay?’

‘Yes, yes, fine, fine. Dad is, well…you know. His doctor told him he needs to cut out the alcohol and start exercising but he said that he’s seventy-two years old and he doesn’t care if his time is now.

’ Mike doesn’t say anything to this although he cannot help the thought that if his father’s time was now, it would be a good thing.

The violence in his parents’ marriage has stopped but only because his father is weaker and his mother generally makes a plan to stay out of his way.

Since he retired, Mike’s father, Vince, sits on the couch watching television and drinking beer.

Mike has told his mother, Rose, to leave him many times but she claims to be too old to make the change and to have to live by herself.

Any time Mike suggested having his mother come live with them, Sandy vetoed that idea immediately.

The only thing Mike can do for her is send her money each month, something that really pisses Sandy off.

‘How are the babies?’ she asks and Mike smiles, because he can hear how much she loves her grandchildren.

His parents live nearly two hours away, which isn’t so far, but they don’t get to see their grandchildren as much as his mother would like, and to be fair, Mike doesn’t really want them near his father.

‘They’re good, growing up, you know.’

‘And…Sandy?’ his mother asks tentatively.

‘She’s…’ Mike takes a long sip of beer. ‘Fine.’

‘Good… good, that’s good.’

‘Mum, is anything wrong?’ Usually she talks without him needing to say anything, telling him about her friends at bridge and the library and her outings with the community centre.

‘Well…look, darling, I didn’t want to say anything…because it really wasn’t my place and I can’t understand why she called me anyway.’

‘I don’t understand, Mum, who called you?’ He lifts the beer bottle to take another sip but finds it empty so he gets up and takes another from the fridge.

‘Well, I might as well tell you everything. Sandy called me last week and, you know, she doesn’t call me at all.

I mean I think I’ve heard from her five times in the last eight years.

’ Mike knows this is the truth. He has, over the time he and Sandy have been together, tried to encourage his wife to give his mother a call on her birthday and sometimes just to check in but Sandy always has the same reply to his requests which is, ‘She’s your mother and I have to call my parents and I am not asking you to speak to them at all. ’

‘What day did she call, Mum?’ he asks, his heart beating a little faster as he grips the beer bottle.

‘Oh, it was last Monday, I think. No, yes actually, definitely last Monday because there was a meeting at the library where we had a talk about ageing gracefully. They encouraged us to exercise and lift weights but honestly, I feel like?—’

‘Mum,’ he interrupts, ‘you said Sandy called you on Monday?’ He can only assume that since the therapy appointment with Lana was in the morning, it was after the debacle of a session where he walked out.

‘Yes, and you know I was very surprised, sweetheart, but I was even more bothered by what she had to say.’ His mother does this when there is something she is afraid of saying.

He knows this from his childhood, when she had to give his father bad news about a plumbing bill or about something he’d done wrong at school or anything else that might set the man off.

She dances around uncomfortable subjects, afraid to put a foot wrong because she knows what happens if she does.

She takes a deep breath. ‘I’ve thought about this for days, Mike. And I never wanted to say anything.’

‘Mum, please,’ Mike pleads.

‘Well, she said that she wanted me to talk to you because you were starting to behave like your father and she was worried that the kids were going to get hurt and I asked her… I mean I hardly knew what to say but I had to ask her so I did, I asked her if she ever got hurt and she told me that?—’

‘Mum…Mum.’ Mike is not going to listen to this.

‘Anything she said is a lie. You know me. I wouldn’t hurt her or the kids, you know that.

’ He raises his voice as he picks up the half-full bottle of beer and paces around the kitchen, feeling its weight in his hand.

He thinks he can actually see red, actually see the colour red in front of his eyes as rage fills him up, and he lifts the bottle to chuck it against the wall, only stopping because he knows the noise will bring the kids downstairs. That lying, lying bitch.

Why include his mother? Why upset his mother?

‘Please don’t be angry at me, Mike. I didn’t want to say anything but I can’t stop thinking about it and I had to know.

But I do know you and I know you wouldn’t hurt those babies, or her.

’ His mother’s voice is filled with desperation.

She cannot have a son who is abusing his family and Mike knows that.

Taking a deep breath, he speaks slowly and carefully so that he does not give in to the rage.

It’s rapidly being replaced with shame anyway, shame that anyone, especially his mother, could believe this about him.

But she’s not the only one, of course. Lana and probably the guy who treated Sandy before that and now the police believe the same thing and there is nothing Mike can do about it because even his picture evidence means nothing.

‘I have never and would never hurt my family. I promise you that. Sandy is…I don’t think she’s right in the head at the moment.

She’s behaving very strangely and I am trying to get her help, but you can’t believe anything she says. ’

‘Oh, darling,’ says his mother and he can hear the relief in her voice, ‘why didn’t you tell me? I would have come to stay and help– you know you can call me. Shall I come? I could set off tomorrow.’

Mike finds his eyes filling with tears and his shame intensifies at his weakness.

‘No…no, it’s fine, really, everything is fine.

Everything will be fine, don’t worry.’ Things would be easier with his mother here, but would he be able to tell her to leave his father at home?

Would she agree to that? And does he want her to see what’s going on here, to know that Sandy is actually missing, or that the police and her therapist think she’s missing because he did something to her?

No, he doesn’t want that. He can’t deal with having to explain this to anyone else right now.

‘Things are all right, I promise,’ he says.

‘Okay…okay, you call me anytime, anytime at all, and tell Sandy she can do the same.’

‘I will, but I need to go now, Felix is calling me.’

‘Of course, of course, you kiss those babies for me and I’m here for whatever you need.’

‘Thanks, Mum, love you.’

‘Love you too.’

Mike ends the call and sits down in the silent kitchen in the silent house.

Sandy must hate him very much. Her hatred is gorge-deep and filled with anger.

Why would she have done that to his mother?

How could she have done that? Sandy would have known how devastated his mother would be to hear that about her son.

It was an incredibly callous and cruel thing to do. But it shouldn’t surprise him.

He finishes the beer, opens another one, drinks half of that and then he listens to the message from the detective again.

Screw it , he thinks, tapping on his phone to return the call. The man won’t be at work but it doesn’t matter.

‘You’ve reached the message bank of Detective Nathan Franks. If this is an emergency, please hang up and call triple zero, otherwise leave a message at the beep.’

‘Yeah hi, I mean, hello, this is Mike Burkhart, my wife is… You called me about my wife, Sandy. I’m just returning your call.’

There are a thousand other things he could say but he hangs up and then he goes upstairs and checks on his sleeping children before he puts himself to sleep with beer. He dreams of his hands around his wife’s neck, of strangling the breath out of her pretty body.

He thinks about her forgetting the insurance policies and about the lies she told her therapist and he wonders if, perhaps, Sandy is, as he told his mother, not right in the head, if something is actually going on with her.

Has she had a breakdown and disappeared or has she disappeared on purpose to drive him crazy and to make his life miserable?

If something is wrong with her, he would be able to find some sympathy for her, but if she is doing this with intent, if she knows what’s going to happen to him because of it, then he needs to know why she has done it.

And he also needs to know what else she has planned.

What exactly is Sandy hoping to achieve by disappearing, and what does that mean for him?