“So, shall we watch some television?” the Wolf asked as he finished with a flourish, tossing the last useless letter into the trash.
The answer, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf knew, was routinely yes, followed by their taking their usual seats and flipping through the usual channels to find the usual shows. There was something wondrously reassuring, almost seductive, in the idea that she could simply say yes and shuffle back into the way things had been. With popcorn.
She was torn. A large part of her insisted that she just keep her mouth shut and let everything slide inexorably back into the life that made her so happy. But a small portion of her acknowledged that nothing in the world was as crippling as uncertainty. She had been through that with disease, and now she wondered whether she could ever take her husband’s hand and hold it in her own again without frightening, lingering doubts.
While this debate raged within her, making her almost dizzy with anxiety, she heard herself say, “We have to talk about something.”
It was a little like someone else had entered the room and some other Mrs. Big Bad Wolf was speaking out loud, in an overdramatic, theatrically ominous tone of voice. She wanted to shout at this intruder, “You keep your mouth shut!” and “How dare you come between my husband and me?”
The Big Bad Wolf turned slowly toward her.
“Talk?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Is there something wrong? Are you feeling bad? Do I need to take you to the doctor?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Is there some problem at work?”
“No.”
“Well, okay. Let’s talk. It’s something else, I guess. So what’s on your mind?” He didn’t sound anything other than mildly bemused. He gave a little shrug and gestured toward her as if inviting her to continue.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf wondered what her face looked like. Was she pale? Was it furrowed with fears? Did her lip tremble? Did her eye twitch? Why couldn’t he see the distress that she knew she was wearing like a loud and colorful suit of clothes?
She felt unable to breathe. She wondered if she would fall to the floor choking. “I…” she stopped.
“Yes. You what?” he responded. The Wolf still seemed oblivious to the hot-iron agony that encased his wife.
“I read what you’re writing,” she said.
The grin on her husband’s face faded quickly. “What?”
“You left the keys to your office when we switched cars the other night. I went in and read some of the pages by your computer.”
“My new book,” he said.
She nodded.
“You were not supposed to do that,” the Wolf said. The timbre of his voice had changed. The amused tone had been replaced by an even, flat sound, like a single dissonant note on an out-of-tune piano played over and over. She had expected him to cry out in outrage and anger. The equanimity in his voice frightened her. “My office, what I’m working on, that belongs to me. It’s private. I’m not ready to show it to anyone. Even you.”
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf wanted to say, “Forgive me” or “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” She was suddenly confused. She was unsure who had done the worse thing: herself, for violating her husband’s space and work, or him-because he might be a killer.
But she swallowed all her apologies like sour-tasting milk. “Are you going to kill them?” she asked. She could not believe she was asking that question. It was beyond blunt. If he replied yes what would that mean for her? If he said no how could she believe him?
It never occurred to her that she might be putting herself at risk merely by asking.
He smiled. “What do you think I’m going to do?” he said. The timbre in his voice had changed again. Now he spoke like someone going over a grocery list.
“I think you intend to kill them. I don’t understand why.”
“You might get that impression from what you read,” he replied.
“There are three…” She’d started a question, but stopped, unsure what the question should be.
“Yes. Three. It’s a unique situation,” he replied to something she had not asked.
“Doctor Jayson and that girl at my school, Jordan-”
“And one other,” he said, interrupting. “Her name is Sarah. You don’t know her. But she’s special. They are all very special.”
This word special seemed to be wrong, she thought, but she could not say how or why. She shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand at all.”
“How much did you read?” he asked.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf hesitated. The conversation wasn’t going as she’d thought it would. She had confronted her husband and asked him if he was a killer, and this should have made everything clear, but instead they were talking about words.
“Just a little,” she said. “Maybe a page or two.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Big Bad Wolf knew this was the truth, but it felt like a lie.
“So you don’t really know what the book is about, do you? Or what I’m trying to achieve in what context. If I asked you about plot, or characters, or style, you couldn’t really answer, could you?”
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf shook her head. She wanted to cry. “It’s about killing.”
“All my books are about killing. That’s what mystery and thriller writers do. I thought you liked them.”
This comment, maybe even intended as a criticism, struck home. “Of course I like them. You know that,” she said. It sounded like a plea coming out of her mouth. What she wanted to say was, “Those books are what brought us together. Those books saved my life.”
“But you only read, what did you say, a couple of pages? And you think you know what’s in the book?”
“No, no, of course not.”
“You realize there are several hundred pages that you didn’t read in that manuscript?”
“Yes.”
“If you picked up a spy novel by, oh, say John le Carré, and read two or three random pages from somewhere in the middle, do you think you could tell me what the book was about?”
“No.”
“Do you even know whether my book is in the first or third person?”
“It seemed like the first person. You were talking about murder-”
He interrupted. “Me? Or my character?”
She wanted to cry again. She wanted to sob and toss herself down on the floor because she didn’t know the answer. A part of her feared you and a part of her pleaded for your character. All she managed was, “I don’t know.” The words came out in a half-wail.
“Don’t you trust me?” he asked.
Tears finally started to well up in Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s eyes. “Of course I do,” she said.
“And don’t you love me?” he asked.
This question pierced her. “Yes, yes,” she choked. “You know I do…”
“Then I don’t see what the problem is,” he said.
Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s head spun. Nothing was happening the way she thought it should. “The pictures on the wall. The schedules. Diagrams. And then the words I read…”
He smiled, benignly. “When you put it all together it made you envision one thing…” She nodded. “… But the truth could be something totally different.”
Her head bounced up and down in agreement.
“So,” he continued, speaking softly, almost with the same simple tone and terms one would use with a child, “everything you saw made you worried, right?”
“Yes.”
He leaned back in his seat. “But I’m a writer,” he said, layering a grin across his face. “And sometimes to let loose creativity you have to invent something real. Something that seems like it is happening right in front of you. Something more real than real, I suppose. That’s a good way of putting it. That’s the process. Don’t you think that’s true?”