The Silent Wife: A Novel Read online

  Praise for The Silent Wife

  “A. S. A. Harrison knocks it out of the park with her first novel, The Silent Wife. With a spare, elegant, and deft hand, she paints two dueling psychological portraits of longtime live-in lovers who become putative killer and hapless victim in a tale that no one is likely to forget anytime soon. I couldn’t put this book down.”

  —Elizabeth George, New York Times bestselling author of Believing the Lie

  “What a deliciously wicked pleasure The Silent Wife was to read. I love books where I can’t guess the outcome, although I was rooting for Jodi all the way. A very clever, very funny comedy of manners spliced with a domestic thriller.”

  —Kate Atkinson, New York Times bestselling author of Life After Life and Case Histories

  “Beautifully written and deeply unsettling, this darkly funny examination of what happens when you’ve got nothing left to lose is also brilliantly addictive. It left me almost breathless as I raced toward the devastating finale.”

  —S. J. Watson, New York Times bestselling author of Before I Go to Sleep

  “SUPERB . . . As a novel about the dark side of marriage and relationships, it’s better than Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. A must read for anyone who is occasionally ruthless, reckless, or psychologically weird—and anyone who loves clever books with depth and heart.”

  —Sophie Hannah, author of The Other Woman’s House

  “Like a tiny crack in the windshield of destiny, The Silent Wife examines the ultimate shattering of a perfectly civilized marriage. Intense, hypnotic, and thoroughly absorbing, Harrison challenges her characters to venture beyond their comfort zones, into a world where anything is possible, even murder.”

  —Elizabeth Brundage, author of A Stranger Like You and The Doctor’s Wife

  “This is an utterly compelling story, gorgeously written and with so many shocks and surprises that I raced through it to find out what happens next. My highest recommendation.”

  —Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author of Gravity

  “A chilling portrait of a relationship gone terribly awry. Harrison takes the reader down a wickedly twisted path that has us at once rooting for and wary of the protagonists. A breathtaking story that will keep you reading well into the night and wide awake long after the final page.”

  —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence

  “A gripping story of deception, denial, and double-edged revenge. The Silent Wife combines taut pacing and psychological nuance to haunting and memorable effect.”

  —Nancy Richler, author of The Imposter Bride

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE SILENT WIFE

  A. S. A. Harrison is the author of four nonfiction books. The Silent Wife is her debut novel and she was at work on a new psychological thriller when she died in 2013. Harrison was married to the visual artist John Massey and lived in Toronto.

  THE SILENT WIFE

  A Novel

  A. S. A. Harrison

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  First published in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright © A.S.A. Harrison, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60806-7

  CIP data available

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To Jonathan

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My gratitude goes to John Massey for traveling the road with me; to Beth Kapusta, my first and best reader; to psychotherapists Diane Scally and Elly Roselle for sharing their knowledge and insights across lifetimes; to Margaret Dragu for showing me the inside of club life; and to Bruce Bailey for generously loaning his domiciles. For dedicated location scouting I’m grateful to Lisa Harrison, Chelsea Nash-Wolfe, Barb Webb, Steve Reinke, and Philip von Zweck. No one deserves thanks more than my agents, Samantha Haywood and Kimberly Witherspoon, and William Callahan is also to be acknowledged. As well, my appreciation goes to my editors, Tara Singh, Adrienne Kerr, and Marion Donaldson, and to copy editor Sheila Moody. Last but not least, I’m indebted to Karyn Marcus for the edit that changed everything.

  CONTENTS

  Praise for The Silent Wife

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE: HER AND HIM

  1: Her

  2: Him

  3: Her

  4: Him

  5: Her

  6: Him

  7: Her

  8: Him

  9: Her

  10: Him

  11: Her

  12: Him

  13: Her

  14: Him

  15: Her

  16: Him

  17: Her

  18: Him

  19: Her

  20: Him

  21: Her

  22: Him

  23: Her

  24: Him

  25: Her

  26: Him

  27: Her

  28: Him

  PART TWO: HER

  PART ONE

  HER AND HIM

  1

  HER

  It’s early September. Jodi Brett is in her kitchen, making dinner. Thanks to the open plan of the condo, she has an unobstructed view through the living room to its east-facing windows and beyond to a vista of lake and sky, cast by the evening light in a uniform blue. A thinly drawn line of a darker hue, the horizon, appears very near at hand, almost touchable. She likes this delineating arc, the feeling it gives her of being encircled. The sense of containment is what she loves most about living here, in her aerie on the twenty-seventh floor.

  At forty-five, Jodi still sees herself as a young woman. She does not have her eye on the future but lives very much in the moment, keeping her focus on the everyday. She assumes, without having thought about it, that things will go on indefinitely in their imperfect yet entirely acceptable way. In other words, she is deeply unaware that her life is now peaking, that her youthful resilience—which her twenty-year marriage to Todd Gilbert has been slowly eroding—is approaching a final stage of disintegration, that her notions about who she is and how she ought to conduct herself are far less stable than she supposes, given that a few short months are all it will take to make a killer out of her.

  If you told her this she would not believe you. Murder is barely a word in her vocabulary, a concept without meaning, the subject of stories in the news having to do with people she doesn’t know and will never meet. Domestic violence she finds especially implausible, that everyday friction in a family setting could escalate to such a degree. There are reasons for this incomprehension, even aside from her own habit of self-control: She is no idealist, believes in taking the bad with the good, does not pick fights, and is not easily baited.

  The dog, a golden retriever with a sil
ky blond coat, sits at her feet as she works at the cutting board. Every now and then she throws him a slice of raw carrot, which he catches in his mouth and joyfully grinds up with his molars. This vegetable toss is a long-standing predinner ritual, one that she and the dog have enjoyed from the time she brought him home as a roly-poly pup to take Todd’s mind off his yearning for progeny, which sprang up, seemingly overnight, around the time he turned forty. She named the dog Freud in anticipation of the fun she could poke at his namesake, the misogynist whom she was forced to take seriously at university. Freud passing gas, Freud eating garbage, Freud chasing his tail. The dog is endlessly good-natured and doesn’t mind in the least being an object of fun.

  Trimming vegetables and chopping herbs, she throws herself bodily into the work. She likes the intensity of cooking—the readiness of the gas flame, the timer marking off the minutes, the immediacy of the result. She’s aware of the silence beyond the kitchen, everything rushing to the point in time when she’ll hear his key in the lock, an event that she anticipates with pleasure. She can still feel that making dinner for Todd is an occasion, can still marvel at the stroke of fate that brought him into her life, a matter of rank chance that did not seem to favor a further acquaintance, much less a future of appetizing meals, lovingly prepared.

  It came to pass on a rainy morning in spring. Busy with her graduate studies in psychology, waiting tables at night, overworked, exhausted, she was moving house, driving north on State Street in a rental van loaded with her household goods. As she prepared to change lanes from right to left she might have looked over her shoulder or maybe not. She found the van awkward, didn’t have a feel for it, and on top of this her windows were fogged and she’d missed her turn at the last set of lights. Given these conditions she might have been distracted—a question that later came to be much discussed between them. When he clipped her driver’s-side door and spun her into oncoming traffic, there was a general honking of horns and squealing of brakes, and before she could pull herself together—before she fully realized that her van had come to a standstill and she was perfectly alright—he was screaming at her through her closed window.

  “You crazy bitch. What in God’s name do you think you’re doing? Are you some kind of maniac? Where did you learn to drive? People like you should stay off the road. Are you going to get out of your car or are you just going to sit there like an imbecile?”

  His tirade that day in the rain did not give a favorable impression, but a man who’s been in a car crash is going to be irate even if it’s his own fault, which in this instance it was not, so when he called a few days later to ask her to dinner, she graciously accepted.

  He took her to Greektown, where they ate lamb souvlaki washed down with cold retsina. The restaurant was crowded, the tables close together, the lights bright. They found themselves shouting over the din and laughing at their failure to be heard. What conversation they could manage was pared down to succinct phrases like, “The food is good . . . I like it here . . . my windows were fogged . . . if it hadn’t happened I would never have met you.”

  She didn’t go out on many bona fide dates. The men she knew from university took her for pizza and beer and counted out their money. They’d meet her at the restaurant scruffy and unshaven, still in the clothes they’d worn to class. Whereas Todd had put on a clean shirt, and he’d picked her up, and they’d driven to the restaurant together—and now he was looking after her, refilling her glass and checking on her comfort level. Sitting across from him, she was pleased with what she saw—the way he casually took up space and his air of being in charge. She liked the homey habit he had of wiping his knife on his bread and that he put down his credit card without looking at the bill.

  When they were back in his truck he drove her to his building site in Bucktown, a nineteenth-century mansion that he was reconverting—from rooming house back into single-family dwelling. Guiding her up the crumbling walk he lightly held her elbow.

  “Careful now. Watch your step.”

  It was a Gothic Revival eyesore of decaying brick, flaking paint, and narrow windows, with spiky gables that gave it a menacing upward thrust—a vulgar aberration on a street lined with square-built structures that were fully restored. In place of the front porch there was a ladder to be climbed, and in the entrance hall a massive chandelier lay on its side. The front room, a vaultlike space with an implausibly high ceiling, featured heaps of rubble and dangling wires.

  “There used to be a wall here,” he said, gesturing. “You can see the footprint.”

  She looked at the floor with its missing planks.

  “When they turned it into a boardinghouse they built a lot of partitions. The way it is now, this is back to the original layout. You can really see how it’s going to shape up.”

  She found it hard to picture any sort of end result. It didn’t help that there was no electricity, the only light a pale wash coming from the streetlamps outside. He lit a candle, dripped some of the melting wax into a saucer, and fixed it upright. He was keen to show her around, and they carried the candle through the empty rooms—the would-be kitchen, the long-lost parlor, provisional spaces defined by walls that were down to the lathwork. Upstairs, the rooming house it used to be was more in evidence, the bedroom doors fixed with latches and the walls painted in unlikely colors. The musty smell was strong up here and the atmosphere was eerie with the old wood creaking underfoot and the candle creating ripples of light that cast the two of them as specters on the walls and ceiling.

  “It’s not a restoration,” he said. “It will all be overhauled and modernized. Oak floors, solid-core doors, double-pane windows . . . This will be something that everybody wants, an old house with personality but one that’s absolutely solid and up-to-date.”

  He had taken it on single-handed, he said, learning the trades as he went along. He was doing this instead of university, had borrowed money, was living on credit and optimism. She understood just how stretched he was when she saw the rolled-up sleeping bag in one of the bedrooms, and in the bathroom a razor and a can of foam.

  “So what do you think?” he asked, when they were back downstairs.

  “I’d like to see it when it’s done,” she said.

  He laughed. “You think I’m in over my head.”

  “It’s ambitious,” she conceded.

  “You’re going to be impressed,” he said.

  —

  By the time she hears him come in, both lake and sky have receded into a velvety dusk. She switches off the overhead fixture, leaving the valance lights to orchestrate a mellow glow, removes her apron, and licks her fingers to smooth the hair at her temples, a gesture that is pure anticipation, listening all the while to his movements in the foyer. He fusses over the dog, hangs up his jacket, empties his pockets into the cast bronze bowl on the console table. There’s a brief silence as he looks through the mail. She arranges a smoked trout on a plate with a fan of crackers.

  He’s a big man with hair the color of sand, slate-gray eyes, and a whopping charge of vitality. When Todd Gilbert enters a room people wake up. That’s what she would say if someone asked her what she loved most about him. Also that he can make her laugh when he wants to, and that unlike a lot of men she knows he’s good at multitasking, so that even as he’s taking a call on his cell phone he can do up the clasp on her necklace or show her how to use a two-step sommelier corkscrew.

  He swipes her forehead with his lips, steps around her, and reaches into the cupboard for the cocktail glasses. “Looks good,” he says. “What is it?” Referring to the golden, pastry-encrusted meat, which is out of the oven and resting in the pan.

  “Beef Wellington. We’ve had it before, remember? You like it.”

  It’s his job to make the martinis. As she whisks together a marinade for the vegetables, she’s aware of the clatter of ice cubes and the sharp fragrance he makes with his knife, cutting into a lemon. He bumps against her, knocks things over, gets in her way, but she likes having him nea
r, the comforting bulk of him. She takes in the smell of his day, gravitates to his body heat. He’s a man whose touch is always warm, a matter of animal significance for someone who is nearly always cold.

  Having set her martini in front of her on the counter, he carries his own, along with the trout, to the living room, where he puts up his feet and opens the paper that she’s left for him on the coffee table, neatly refolded. She places the French beans and baby carrots in separate steamers and takes the first sip of her drink, liking how the vodka instantly hits her bloodstream and streaks through her limbs. From the sofa he throws out comments on the day’s news: the next Olympics, a hike in interest rates, a forecast of rain. When he’s swallowed most of the trout and the last of his martini he gets up and opens a bottle of wine while she carves the beef into thick slabs. They take their plates to the table, where they both have a view of the lustrous sky.

  “How was your day?” he asks, loading up his fork.

  “I saw Bergman,” she says.

  “Bergman. What did she have to say for herself?” He’s shoveling in the beef with steady concentration and speaks without looking up from his plate.

  “She reminded me that it’s been three years since she made the pudding commercial. I think she had it in mind to pin some of the blame on me.”

  He knows her clients by the code names she gives them. Since they come and go while he’s at work he’s never encountered even a single one, but she keeps him up-to-date, and in a sense he’s intimate with them all. She doesn’t see any harm in this as long as their real names remain secret. Bergman is code for the out-of-work actress whose last job—the fabled pudding commercial—is a distant memory.

  “So now it’s your fault,” he says.

  “She gets that it’s her desperation that’s putting people off, and why haven’t I helped her with that, she wants to know. Hell’s bells. We’ve been working on that for weeks.”