Page 34 of The Therapist
TWENTY-ONE
WEDNESDAY
Mike
After a few minutes he looks up and takes in the chaos in the living room, where dirty plates are stacked on the coffee table and the kids’ things are scattered everywhere. He didn’t empty their bags last night so the lunchboxes are still in there.
‘Get off your arse, loser,’ he hears his father say and he lets a surge of anger motivate him to stand up. Grabbing as many plates as he can carry, he goes to the kitchen and stacks them in the dishwasher. It’s still dark outside.
‘Twenty minutes,’ he says aloud, deciding that he will clean and tidy for twenty minutes and then he can make himself a cup of coffee before his shower.
It doesn’t take as long as he assumed it would once he gets going and he even manages to cobble together a lunch of cheese sandwiches for the kids along with apples to go with the processed crap he adds to their lunchboxes.
His reward is to use the last capsule for the coffee machine, something else he needs to add to the ever-growing shopping list in his head.
While he waits for the coffee to drip into the cup, he cleans a bit more, wiping down the kitchen counter and throwing out some rotting bananas from the fruit bowl.
With his coffee sitting in front of him, he is hit by a wave of exhaustion at what the rest of the day holds.
He will have to get the kids to school and then drag himself into the office to answer Kellie’s questions all day long as Paul mopes around the office, occasionally touching one of the framed business awards he has hung on the wall.
And Mike knows that all day long he will be waiting for the detective to contact him or for Sandy to turn up or even for the police to come to the office to arrest him for accosting Lana yesterday. That idiotic move churned through his alcohol-fuelled dreams all night long.
It’s now nearly 6 a.m. and he knows the kids will be up soon. He should make some eggs and toast for them using the last of the eggs and the bread, but he doesn’t really have the energy to move.
Looking around the kitchen that Sandy hates, his gaze lands on a high cupboard in the corner and he gets up, opening it and reaching for the pale blue jar with the words ‘ Cookie Jar ’ on the front in thick black letters. Sandy brought it home from some craft fair when she was pregnant with Felix.
‘What’s that for? You don’t eat cookies and those things don’t keep them fresh anyway,’ he said.
She shrugged and smiled. ‘I know but it’s so cute – we can throw loose change in there.’
And that’s what they have used it for, for years. Few people carry cash these days but Mike still finds himself with coins on the odd occasion he does use actual money.
The jar was filled with coins the last time he looked, gold one- and two-dollar coins as well as lots of silver.
He wonders how much might be in there and feels himself flush with embarrassment that he thinks the money may help, but his lost job is on his mind all the time.
How long until he can’t pay the mortgage?
Even fifty dollars extra would bring some comfort right now.
He reaches up with both hands because he knows the jar is heavy but when he lifts it with some force, he nearly smashes it into the top of the cupboard because it’s so light.
Confused, he brings the cookie jar, which does not rattle with coins as it has always done, back to the table and then drains his coffee.
Opening it, he sees that it’s stuffed full of pieces of paper. He reaches in and pulls out a handful.
And then he smooths the pieces of paper, some crumpled, some neatly folded, with his hands and stares down at them in horror. ‘What the hell?’ he mutters.
Each piece is an article, either from a newspaper or printed out from the internet.
Reading through the headlines, one after the other, he realises that Sandy is not suffering from some kind of mental breakdown. Sandy is planning something. And he is in trouble because he has no idea what she is going to do.
Every article is about an abused wife who kills her husband. Every single one.
And in each article, the wife has not gone to prison for her crime.
WOMAN WHO BEAT ABUSIVE HUSBAND TO DEATH CLEARED OF MURDER
WOMAN ABUSED BY HUSBAND ACQUITTED OF FATAL STABBING
BATTERED WOMAN FOUND ‘NOT GUILTY’ OF HUSBAND’S DEATH
There are at least twenty articles, some going back decades. Mike reads snatches of the stories that come from all over the world.
A Minnesota woman was cleared of all charges in the stabbing murder of her husband, telling reporters outside court that, ‘It was him or me. I knew that the next time he started hitting me, he would not stop until I was dead.’
Friends of the Sydney-based woman have expressed gratitude to the judge for finding her ‘not guilty’ of murder in the first degree after she hit her husband with a hammer, killing him in two blows.
‘She suffered for years at his hands. She was always covered in bruises and every time she tried to leave, he found her and beat her again. No one seemed to be able to help. He had too many connections, too much money, and everyone she reached out to failed her,’ a friend who did not want to be named is quoted as saying.
Today, a woman from Manchester has escaped a prison sentence for the poisoning murder of her abusive husband.
After many years of emotional and physical abuse, the woman felt she had no choice but to end her husband’s life.
Council for the defence stated that she had acted in self-defence and this was accepted by the jury.
The ghoulish collection stuns him. Over the last few years of his marriage, he has seriously questioned the kind of woman he is married to, but looking down at the articles, he understands he has underestimated just how different a human being Sandy is.
And now she’s disappeared and the police want to question him.
Incandescent rage floods through his body and he stands, lifting the jar and chucking it across the kitchen, where it connects with a wall and shatters into pieces, blue shards of pottery flying everywhere.
‘Dad, Dad,’ he hears as he stands staring down at the wreckage. ‘What was the noise, Daddy? There’s a noise,’ shouts Felix, and Mike wants to roar with frustration but he can’t do that because now he’s woken the kids and he has to clean up the mess. He hates his life, hates it.
Two hours later he’s dropped the kids at school and he’s parked outside work, giving himself a pep talk so that he can get through the next hour and the one after that. He will have to leave early again today to pick up the kids but Paul doesn’t seem to mind – but then, why would he?
One comforting thought comes to him as he gets out of his car: he is here and Sandy is not, so whatever she had planned, whatever she was thinking, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Even with his heavy day weighing on him, he is able to smile at that thought.
Paul calls him in for a meeting as he walks through the door.
‘I can give you one month’s pay as severance.
I know it’s…a paltry sum for someone who’s worked for a company for ten years but there’s nothing I can do, Mike, just nothing I can do.
’ The older man shakes his head sadly and Mike wants to protest at the unfairness of it all but then the company going bankrupt will have to get in line behind all the other unfair things he has twisting through his mind.
He shrugs. ‘Not much you can do, Paul. I understand.’
‘I’m not the one making the decisions anymore. It’s the worst feeling in the world, I swear, it’s just the worst.’
‘I hear that,’ says Mike and he gets up to leave. You have no idea how bad things can get, no idea at all.
‘Is your wife back from her…where did you say she’s gone again?’
‘She’s taken herself on a little holiday,’ says Mike, unable to conceal the bitterness in his tone.
Paul looks at him over his glasses. ‘Not the best time for it.’
‘No,’ agrees Mike, ‘no, it’s not.’
He’s grateful to leave at 3 p.m. so he can get the kids, grateful to not be watching the front door, waiting for the police. The detective has not called him either and he debates with himself over calling again but decides against it.
When he pulls up outside school, his phone rings and he sees that, as though he has conjured the man out of thin air, it’s the detective.
Lifting the phone to answer it, he watches his finger tremble as it goes to slide across the screen.
And then he puts the phone down on the passenger seat, watches it ring until it stops. I can’t do it. I just can’t do it.
He takes the kids grocery shopping, letting them choose what they want as long as it’s on sale.
He doesn’t have the energy for an argument.
In his head he plans some meals that he knows he can cook while Lila and Felix debate a bar of chocolate over a packet of small chocolates, eventually deciding on the packet so they can share it equally.
The total for all the groceries makes him sick and he contemplates putting some stuff back but the kids are ratty and tired and he just wants to get home.
For dinner, he manages a passable spaghetti and sauce for the kids although he assumes that part of the reason they don’t complain is because they are allowed to watch television while they eat, and he gets through bath time and bedtime with the usual issues.
He cannot imagine doing this alone for the rest of his life but the kids won’t be little forever.
There are plenty of single dads in the world, plenty.
He has stuffed all of Sandy’s hideous articles at the top of the cupboard, not wanting to look at them but also wanting to keep them for when she does turn up, if she does turn up.
Just after 8 p.m., he’s in the kitchen, scrolling through job ads, despite having already looked today, hoping that something new pops up, when his phone vibrates with a text.
It’s probably Paul with yet another request from the auditor which Mike has no interest in reading but he opens it anyway without looking at who it’s from.
There’s something you need to know about your wife. Please contact me.
Mike stares down at the words. Is this a joke?
And if so, why? He doesn’t recognise the number.
It could be the detective again but why would he change numbers?
And a detective wouldn’t send a message like that.
Maybe it’s Sandy? But she wouldn’t say ‘your wife’.
Who knows something more about his wife?
Screw it , he thinks and then he taps on the number.