The Husband's Secret

Her body was found the next morning by two nine-year-old boys who were riding their BMX bikes through the Wattle Valley Park. They stopped at the playground and found her lying at the bottom of the slide. She had her school blazer placed over her like a blanket, as if to keep her warm, and a pair of rosary beads in her hands. She’d been strangled. ‘Traumatic asphyxiation’ was the cause of death. No signs of a struggle. Nothing to scrape from her fingernails. No usable fingerprints. No hairs. No DNA; Rachel asked the question when she read about cases being solved through DNA testing in the late nineties. No suspects.

‘But where was she going?’ Ed kept asking, as if Rachel would finally remember the answer if he asked the question often enough. ‘Why was she walking through that park?’

Sometimes, after he’d asked her over and over, he’d end up sobbing with rage and frustration. Rachel couldn’t bear it. She wanted nothing to do with his grief. She didn’t want to know about it, or feel it, or share it. Hers was bad enough. How could she cope with carrying his as well?

She wondered now why they couldn’t turn to each other to share their grief. She knew they’d loved each other, but when Janie died, neither of them had been able to bear the sight of each other’s tears. They’d held on to each other the way strangers do in a natural disaster, their bodies stiff, awkwardly patting shoulders. And poor little Rob was caught in the middle, a teenage boy clumsily trying to make everything right, all false smiles and cheery lies. No wonder he became a real estate agent.

The water was too cold now.

Rachel began to shiver uncontrollably, as if she had hypothermia. She put her hands on the sides of the bath and went to stand up.

She couldn’t do it. She was stuck in here for the night. Her arms, her dead-white stick-like arms, had no strength in them. How was it possible that this useless, frail, blue-veined body was the same one that had once been so brown, firm and strong?

‘That’s a good tan for April,’ Toby Murphy had said to her that day. ‘Sunbake, do you, Rachel?’

That’s why she was seven minutes late. She was flirting with Toby Murphy. Toby was married to her friend Jackie. He was a plumber and needed an office assistant. Rachel had gone for an interview and she stayed in Toby’s office for over an hour, flirting. Toby was an incorrigible flirt, and she was wearing the new dress that Marla had convinced her to buy, and Toby kept looking at her bare legs. Rachel would never have been unfaithful to Ed, and Toby adored his wife, so everyone’s marriage vows were safe, but still, he was looking at her legs and she liked it.

Ed wouldn’t have been happy if she’d got the job with Toby. He didn’t know about the interview. Rachel sensed he felt competitive towards Toby, something to do with Toby being a tradie and Ed being a less masculine pharmaceutical salesman. Ed and Toby played tennis together and Ed generally lost. He pretended it didn’t matter but Rachel could tell that it always rankled.

So it was particularly mean of her to enjoy Toby looking at her legs.

Her sins that day had been so trite. Vanity. Self-indulgence. A tiny betrayal of Ed. A tiny betrayal of Jackie Murphy. But maybe those trite little sins were the worst. The person who killed Janie had probably been sick, crazy in the head, whereas Rachel was sane and self-aware, and she knew exactly what she was doing when she let her dress ride a bit further up her knees.

The body wash she’d poured into the bathwater floated on the surface like drops of oil, slimy and greasy. Rachel tried again to heave herself out of the bath and failed.

Maybe it would be easier if she let the water out first.

She let the plug out with her toe, and the roar of the water going down the drain sounded as it always did, like the roar of a dragon. Rob had been terrified of that drain. ‘Raaah!’ Janie used to yell, making her hands into claws. When the water was gone, Rachel turned herself over onto her front. She got onto her hands and knees. Her kneecaps felt like they were being crushed.

She pulled herself to a half-standing position, held on to the side and tentatively put one leg over, then the other. She was out. Her heart settled. Thank God. No broken bones.

Perhaps that was her last ever bath.

She towelled herself dry and pulled her dressing-gown from the hook behind the door. The dressing-gown was made out of beautiful soft fabric. Another thoughtful gift chosen by Lauren. Rachel’s home was filled with thoughtful gifts chosen by Lauren. For example, that chunky vanilla-scented candle in the glass jar, sitting on her bathroom cabinet.

‘Big smelly candle,’ Ed would have called it.

She missed Ed at funny times. Missed arguing with him. Missed sex. They kept having sex after Janie died. They were both surprised by this, and sickened that their bodies still responded the same way as before, but they kept doing it.

She missed them all: her mother, her father, her husband, her daughter. Each absence felt like its own vicious little wound. None of their deaths was fair. Natural causes be damned, Janie’s murderer was responsible for them all.

Don’t you dare, was the strange thought that came into Rachel’s head when she saw Ed crash to his knees in the hallway one hot February morning. She meant, Don’t you dare leave me here to deal with this pain on my own. She knew right away that he was dead. They said it was a massive stroke, but Ed and her parents had died of broken hearts. Only Rachel’s heart had stubbornly refused to do the right thing and kept on beating. It made her feel ashamed, the way her desire for sex had shamed her. She kept breathing, eating, f**king, living, while Janie rotted in the ground.