Anna Noyes: Goodnight, Beautiful Women

Joni called the sheriff right after it happened. Her voice was clear and steady, and the line she gave was the right one. I believe my husband has drowned in the quarry by our house. She changed out of Jack’s boxers into jeans and a gray button-up. It was difficult picking out appropriate clothing for a woman who’d just lost her husband. She combed her hair until it sparked with static. Joni, who once cried over a Folgers Coffee commercial, hadn’t cried yet. This frustrated her, like a sneeze that wouldn’t come. She tucked some tissues up her sleeve, just in case.

Joni told it to the sheriff like it was. “I wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of my name from outside. Probably around one in the morning. I look out the window by the bed and Jack’s wading into the quarry, holding a small hunk of granite. He was wearing a white T-shirt, so I could see him clearly, and I saw his head go under. By the time I got outside, he was gone.”

The sheriff asked her questions, glancing up at the appropriate moments with a look of sympathy. “Did he give any indication he might do something like this?” he said.

“There were signs,” said Joni.

He looked toward the window that faced the water. “Wish we could dredge it like a lake,” he said. “Depending how far a person swam beyond the shallow ledge, and if he weighed himself down, a body could be trapped in a crevice. We’ll get divers out tomorrow, if he doesn’t show up. Quarry’s can be tricky to search, though. Deep, murky, a lot of junk down there. We might have to drain it some. May I be frank?”

“Of course,” she said.

“There’ll be a thorough investigation. We’ll run a missing persons report. Take every measure. But this sounds like a suicide.” He paused for her reaction, scanning her face, which she let drop into her hands. He patted her shoulder twice.

“Excuse me,” she said, looking at the floor between the spread of her fingers. She tried to think of heartbreaking things as she rooted for the tissue. It had traveled up her sleeve, now a lump by her elbow. That movie where hoodlums kick an old homeless man to death. Footage of cows lowing, wild eyed, on their way to slaughter.

After he left she stood at the window. When she realized who she was looking for she gave a little laugh. There was a smear on the glass where her nose had pressed.

Jack was in the quarry, and he had drowned. He was dead. The other possibilities made her hands start to shake. Jack let Joni watch him go into the quarry, and go under, but he swam to the other side and snuck through the woods. From there he found a new life with a different woman. Another scenario, the most paranoid but not out of the question, was that Jack walked into the water, climbed out on the other side, and was in the woods. He was watching Joni from outside, watching everything she did, because he was testing her. He was trying to see how she would behave when he was gone. If she would fail him.

Jack had been hell-bent for the quarry for a long time. That he was in there seemed to Joni like a brief stage in his life cycle, a necessary hibernation.

Joni knew she was OK, even if her thinking wasn’t. She had clean hair. No salt spilled on her counter and there were no maggots in her trash cans. She had a fruit bowl filled with nectarines, and a row of books on the shelf arranged from large to small.

But she misspoke at the post office. She couldn’t help it. She was talking to a woman who was in town for Labor Day weekend. The woman’s French Bulldog was peeing on the wheelchair ramp. Jack had been gone for two weeks, his body never recovered. Other policemen came and went, asking her questions, looking at her sidelong. And then the suicide was official. And this woman gave Joni a look of pitying concern, and was hugging her, and Joni said thank you, but we can’t be sure now. Nothing is definite. I’m trying not to give up hope that he’ll come home soon. That he’ll come home soon. That was it, she guessed; the tripwire that made gossip of her strange behavior blast through town.

The trouble with Jack began with little things. Joni put her hand on his neck during dinner and he pulled away. He told her that it was payback for the time she didn’t look up when he touched his foot to hers under the table. And then he started counting on his fingers, biting his tongue as he struggled to recall infractions. He counted when she did something wrong, like not lifting the lid on the pot of whatever he was cooking to smell it and taste a bite, or turning away from him in bed to face the wall, even though that’s the only way she could lie comfortably.

One afternoon he showed up during recess at the school where she taught. A crowd was gathered at the jungle gym dome, and there was Jack hanging upside down at the top. He yelled to her in a voice that carried across the playground, “I thought I’d come visit you. You never take off work to visit me. You never surprise me in the studio.” The other teacher on duty blew the whistle, and Joni hiked her skirt and climbed over a rung to be in there with him. He stayed hanging upside down and said, “You have to kiss me now, Teach. Since I came out all this way.”

The awful thing was how his face looked, with the blood rushing into his forehead. His blond hair was a wild beard. His eyes curved down at the corners. He was waiting for her to kiss him, but his mouth looked like a toothy frown. She didn’t want to get near him. When he finally flipped back down he was counting. He gave her a long stare, then headed for his car.

“I’m coming with you,” she yelled after him. When she asked the principal for the rest of the day off, he warned her that the next time her private life interfered with her work life she would be let go. By the time she got her things from the lounge, Jack was pulling out of the lot. Joni jogged after him. She could hear his muffler as he slowed through the curves away from her.

At bedtime she curls around the space that used to be Jack. She holds her hand above the shallow depression from his head, careful not to touch the pillowcase. As she changes into her pajamas she thinks of what someone spying through the window would see: the darkened gears of her spine, her long red hair down her back the way Jack liked it. Sleep is no good. She leaves bed to microwave milk with honey and cinnamon. On the way to the kitchen, she realizes she’s running, and slows herself. Moths thrum against the screen as she closes the kitchen window.

Back under the covers she bites the edge of the mug to stop her teeth from chattering. The night hums with the sound of her pumping blood. When she turns on the fan, there is the promise of what she cannot hear. For example, Jack gasping for air as he breaks the surface of the water, or the wet flop of his steps across the porch as he comes back home.

“Honey Bunny,” she prays, sitting up in bed. She prays to the hot milk sweetened with honey that her mother used to make her on nights she couldn’t sleep. “Honey Bunny, Honey Bunny,” says Joni, but then she has to laugh at herself. She has been praying like this for the past week.

“I think Jack’s still alive,” she’d told her sister, who had just gotten back to New Jersey from the funeral, over the phone.

“Oh?” said her sister. Joni could hear baby’s laughter in the background. Her niece.

“Mop mop mop,” said the baby.

“Oh?” her sister said again. There was a long pause, the clatter of plates. “Sweetie, you need to pray.”

“Prayer won’t bring him back home,” said Joni.

“No, you need to pray for yourself.”