Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [203]
Mitch looks across at her. She bites her tongue. Finally he says, “There’s something else.”
Zenia, it appears, has forged some cheques, on the Woman operating account. She’s made off with the entire allowable overdraft. How much? Fifty thousand dollars, give or take; but in cheques under a thousand dollars each. She cashed them through different banks. She knows the system.
Roz calculates: she can afford it, and the disappearance of Zenia is cheap at the price. “Whose name did she use?” she asks. She knows who the signing officers are. For small cheques like that, it’s Zenia herself and any one of three board members.
“Mine,” says Mitch.
What could be crystal clearer? Zenia is a cold and treacherous bitch. She never loved Mitch. All she wanted was the pleasure of winning, of taking him away from Roz. Also the money. This is obvious to Roz, but not, apparently, to Mitch. “She’s in some kind of trouble,” he says. “I ought to find her.” He must be thinking about the coke dealer.
Roz loses it. “Oh, spare me,” she says.
“I’m not asking you to do anything,” Mitch says, as if Roz would be too mean-spirited to lend a helping hand. “I know where that envelope came from.”
“You’re not actually going after her,” says Roz. “I mean, haven’t you got the message? She’s wiped her spikes on you. She’s made a fool of you. She’s lied and cheated and stolen, and she’s written you off. Believe me, there’s no place in her life for a used dupe.”
Mitch shoots her a glance of intense dislike. This is far too much truth for him. He’s not used to getting dumped, to being betrayed, because it’s never happened to him before. Maybe, thinks Roz, I should give lessons.
“You don’t understand,” he says. But Roz does understand. What she understands is that no matter what went on before this, there was never anyone more important to Mitch than she was, and now there is.
Harriet calls: Mitch has taken the Wednesday-night plane to London.
Roz’s heart hardens. It ceases to burn and drip. The rent in her chest closes over it. She can feel an invisible hand there, tight as a bandage, holding her body shut. That’s it, she thinks. That finally tears it. She buys five murder novels and takes a week off, and goes to Florida, and lies in the sun crying.
48
Mitch comes back. He comes back from the hunt. He comes back in the middle of February, having phoned first; having booked himself a time slot, like any client or petitioner. He turns up on Roz’s doorstep in his sheepskin coat, looking like an empty sack. In his hand he holds a plaintive bouquet of flowers.
For that, Roz would like to kick him – does he think she’s such a cheap date? – but she’s shocked by his appearance. He’s rumpled like a park-bench drunk, his skin is grey from travel, dark hollows ring his eyes. He’s lost weight, his flesh is loose, his face is starting to cave in, like some old guy without his false teeth, like the kids’ Hallowe’en pumpkins a few days after the holiday is over and the candles inside have burned out. That softening, that subsiding inwards towards a damp central emptiness.
Roz feels she should stand in the doorway, a barrier between the cold outside air he brings with him and her own warm house, blocking him, keeping him out. The children need to be protected from this leftover, this sagging echo, this shadowy copy of their real father, with his sinkhole eyes and his smile like crumpled paper. But she owes him a hearing, at least. Wordlessly she takes the flowers – roses, red, a mockery, because she does not delude herself, passion is not what he feels. Not, at least, for her. She lets him in.
“I want to come back,” he tells her, gazing around the high, wide living room, the spacious domain that Roz has made, that was once his to share. Not Will you let me come back? Not I want you back. Nothing to do with Roz, no mention of her at all. It’s the room he’s claiming, the territory. He is deeply mistaken. He thinks he has rights.
“You didn’t find her, did you?” says Roz. She hands him the drink