Mark Dunn - American Decameron

She looked down at those hands now, bandaged and lying still upon her lap — hands tremulous beneath the gauze.

Randi was being accused, indirectly, of setting her husband on fire. The police officers who brought her in after the ambulance had taken Josh away wanted to know how such a thing could happen. She hadn’t been formally arrested, but she could tell that they were getting close to making it all official. She could tell that they suspected she had used a match and the five-gallon can of gasoline they found sitting accusingly upon the awning-covered patio behind the house. Yet there was no smell of gasoline on her husband, or in the yard. There was no dribbled trail upon the patio’s pebbled surface. Moreover, the lawnmower parked next to the can made the container’s presence appear even less incriminating.

Maybe this is why they have yet to slap the handcuffs on me, Randi thought.

Josh’s burns had been severe, but thankfully, given swift actions on the part of both husband and wife, they weren’t life-threatening, barring complications. Randi wanted to see Josh, but being a person of interest in what was now being considered a possible attempted homicide, she could not.

There were injuries to go around. Things had been said by husband and wife the night before during an argument that was unfortunately witnessed by Josh’s mother Agnes after Randi and Josh’s ten-year-old daughter Brie had been sent up to bed. Randi and Josh had had it out in front of Agnes, and the next morning, a couple of hours after the “incident,” Agnes related the vitriolic exchange to the two investigating officers, Lieutenants Selvera and Leggio — willingly, even eagerly, and in great detail.

Now it was Randi’s turn to give her side, to try to convince the two detectives that in spite of the obvious motive, she could not possibly have done this terrible thing. Her mother-in-law’s allegation was outrageous. She could hardly speak to it. But she calmed herself. A glass of juice had been set before her. She took a drink from the straw.

Randi was well aware that she didn’t have to say anything if she didn’t want to. But she wanted to talk. Randi knew that once she was charged, she could have an attorney at her side advising her as to what she should say and what she shouldn’t so that she wouldn’t dig herself a deeper hole than the one she was already in, but she didn’t care. There was a small chance that by simply telling the truth about what happened, here at this early stage, she might be thoroughly exonerated in the minds of the suspicious officers. In the meantime, the cause of her husband’s combustion was still being investigated. Circumstantially, she was the culpable agent. But there was still this: a total absence of any evidence showing how the fire had been ignited.

The pretty female officer sitting across the table from her, Lieutenant Selvera, was patient. Her voice had a slow, soothing cadence. “Take your time,” she said. “Tell us everything that happened last night and everything that happened this morning leading up to the incident.”

The shovel-nosed young male detective leaning against the dingy cinderblock wall nearest the door agreed with a nod.

“Why do I have to talk about what happened last night? Haven’t you heard it all from Agnes? She was right there when the fireworks went off.”

“Fireworks?” Lieutenant Leggio raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t mean that literally.” Randi glanced at the male officer. His face registered nothing. This wasn’t going to be good cop and bad cop, Randi thought. It was going to be good cop and rudely indifferent cop.

“Josh and I–I don’t think we’ve ever had a good marriage,” Randi began. “It was okay in the beginning, but over time we just found ourselves going through the motions. He never asked me for a divorce and I never sought one from him . I don’t think either of us had the stomach for it, and there was Brie to consider. We both felt like this would tear her apart — she’s a very delicate child.” Randi felt weariness creeping in, even though the interview had hardly begun. “We went to the marriage counselor and tried a few things, but we could never make the marriage what we wanted it to be. So we just kept plodding along.”

“What do you and your husband do for a living?” asked Lieutenant Leggio.

“I worked for a small investment company until I got sick and haven’t gone back.”

“Sick?” asked Lieutenant Selvera.

“Yes. I got cancer a couple of years ago. Cervical cancer. Josh and I didn’t want to have any more kids, so I opted for a radical hysterectomy and post-op radiation.”

“How are you doing?”

“Good for now. Time will tell.” Randi stopped her story to take another suck of juice. She couldn’t use her hands, so she bent forward like the little toy drinking bird in the top hat.

“Go on,” said the female lieutenant, after Randi had swallowed.

“Josh works for a construction supply company.”

“What happened last night?” asked Leggio. “What was the fight about?”

“He flipped out. He does this. Something gets to him and he goes postal. Last night it was news from his mother. She was having dinner with us, as she’s no doubt already told you. Josh’s brother, Stephen, had really started to rake it in with this World Wide Web — based company that he’d gotten in on the ground floor with, and here Josh was, working for the same old walls-and-windows company that hadn’t given him a raise in over two years. It started to be about that, and then it morphed into how lousy his life was overall and how even his marriage was just one big fat joke. And he had only stayed with me because of the cancer, but he was miserable. All this in front of his mother.”

“What did she do? The mother,” said Selvera.

“What she always does. She jumped right to his defense. He’s so overworked and this and that, and of course he should get a handle on his temper, but he has every right to want his life to go in a different direction. Textbook mother-in-law malarkey. I felt that I was being ganged up on — as usual — and so I fought back.”

“How did you fight back?”

“I said that I should have married this guy I dated in college. And Josh said that he should have married some girl he’d known since high school, and this is when things entered uncharted territory. He confessed that he’d been seeing her off and on all through our marriage. Until she died. She also had cancer — the same cancer as me. He wondered why the cancer had taken Teri but didn’t take me, as if this were evidence of some cosmic cruelty directed only at him. I was paralyzed. Not only by the fact that my husband wished death upon me, but by his need to mention this longtime affair he’d had with Teri just to hurt me. So I sought a way to hurt him . I told him something that just came to me in that moment: that cervical cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus. That I’d never slept with anyone but Josh. That only he could have given me that virus — the virus that he had apparently gotten from his old girlfriend. Now I knew why I had gotten cancer and who had given it to me. I knew that if I had died, he would have been responsible for my death. Did Agnes mention this? You should have seen her face when I said it.”

Randi took another sip. “This juice is too sweet. Can I just have some water?”

Lieutenant Leggio glanced over at the two-way mirror and nodded. A moment passed and then another officer entered the interrogation room carrying an open plastic water bottle with a straw bobbing inside. He set it down in front of Randi and left.

“Tell me about this morning,” said Lieutenant Selvera, after Randi had taken a long drink of water.