The Pretend Wife Read Free Page A

involving a bridge and a body of water—a simple accident that shaped my life in the most complicated ways. It changed my father into someone else entirely—a cautious widower wearing Docksiders and cable-knit sweaters who devoted his life to the soniferous burblings of certain species of fish. A man who lived, for the most part, underwater. It was as if I grew up with two drowned parents—one literally and one figuratively.
    What I didn’t tell the therapist was that I’d been in the car with my mother—that this was a well-guarded family secret that I’d unearthed. An elderly auntie had let that information slip while she brushed my hair during a visit we made to her nursing home on a trip to Cape Cod. Whenwe got back in the car after the visit, my father told me that Aunt Irene was fading. “She doesn’t have any of the facts straight anymore.” I think the therapist knew that I’d been in the car, if she was paying attention at all. But I could have gone on in therapy with her for years and never told her. I didn’t care, really. She let me talk about what I wanted to. She listened. Wasn’t that all anyone needed? Couldn’t I help other people the same way?
    On the road that morning I was gliding in and out of a thick fog. I’d just inherited my father’s old Volvo and was listening to tapes I hadn’t played much since high school—this particular morning, the Smiths. The Volvo had an exhaust problem that made the car smell strongly of fumes. So the fog, the Smiths, and the fumes gave the morning a surreal dreaminess.
    The dog was a yellow lab, the kind that makes you think of an old gym teacher—stout but still athletic. He appeared out of nowhere. I braked hard but clipped his hind leg. His body bounced off the grille and spun, tumbling down a sloping bank.
    I left the car on the empty road and scrambled down the embankment. There was no one around. The dog’s eyes were glassy, his chest jerking. He wore a red frayed collar with silver tags. I’d never really liked dogs. I didn’t have one growing up—though, with all the lonesomeness, I should have. It might have helped. But it always struck me as odd to have a dog in the house—the notion that a beast could come lumbering through the living room at any moment.
    I was afraid that he might bite me, so I introduced myself and patted the fur on his neck. Then I reached under him and hefted him up. He was heavier than I expected. But I lifted him, his tags jingling like bells, and made myway up the embankment, struggling under his weight. I put him in the backseat, laying my coat over him, and turned the car around, back the way I’d come.
    Secretly, and even though I was the cause of this one, I think I’d always wanted to help in some emergency, to be a witness who helped a victim survive. I’d always wondered if anyone had seen my mother’s car skid off the road into the bridge’s pilings and into the lake—maybe someone driving home from a dinner party? Someone who’d just gotten off a late shift? And, of course, why was my mother out so late with me in the car?
    The receptionist had gotten the dog owner’s phone number off of its tags and had left a message. The dog’s name was Ripken, likely after the Orioles star. I imagined Ripken’s owners—two old baseball fans who’d stride in at some point wearing matching ball caps. I was already missing class, so I decided to stay with the dog to see if he would make it out of surgery. I think I already loved him. He’d looked up at me when I laid him in the backseat like he understood that I was saving him.
    The surgery was taking a long time, and I tried to distract myself with some assigned reading. Lost in descriptions of the synaptic firings of the human brain, I didn’t see or hear Peter walk in, so it was as if he suddenly appeared—a tall man in a crisp shirt and