The Monster’s Wife

Martha fled to the island. The anonymous threats of revenge, dismemberment, rape. Journalists blocking the driveway. The victims’ families and their bottomless grief, their endless lawyers. Friends who were no longer friends. False sympathy from relatives, and even worse, the pity from her parents. No one seemed to care that Martha had divorced him, that she’d found out about the murders at the same time as the rest of them—because after all she’d been his wife, and in doing so, in becoming intimate with a monster, they all thought the same thing—she must have known, she must have suspected. She thought so herself: she should have known, she should have, at least, suspected. 

When she looked back over the seven years of their marriage there were, of course, clues. But at the time, they weren’t clues at all. Yes, she let him handle all the finances. No, she didn’t read the credit card bills and wonder about the duct tape, the quicklime, the hacksaw. No, she didn’t search his pockets for receipts from the local gun dealer. Why should she have? He was an accountant. Yes, he worked long and sometimes strange hours. But after all, tax season, quarterly returns, demanding clients, building a career. People work hard to build successful careers. She’d worked long strange hours herself at the law firm. 

No, she didn’t know about the online stalking, the storage units. It doesn’t cost a fortune to murder people, nor does it take much time. It’s concealing the crime that’s difficult, even if you’re smart and have a system. He was smart. He had a system. He would have gotten away with it, if not for the woman with the sensitive nose and the storage locker next to his. 

Once the trial was over, once it all came out in court, Martha could see that he’d murdered as methodically as he completed his clients’ tax returns. He was careful, obsessive, he did his research. He never confessed to her, not after the police raided their house, not even after he was convicted. The one time she was bold enough to ask, his hands trembled as he glared at her through the glass partition in the county jail. He said, “I thought, at the very least, I could count on you.” Perhaps he thought he was protecting her. But from what?

She resigned from her position at the firm after the trial. Her colleagues pretended otherwise but Martha knows they were relieved. Publicity they wanted, but not this kind. A few years earlier, she’d received a small inheritance from an aunt, the only money that wasn’t commingled with her husband’s, and thus the only asset that wasn’t likely to be claimed by the victims’ families. This was the money that allowed her to escape to Greece. 

Right before she left, her mother shuffled to the window and asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to go on a tour? Won’t you be lonely?”

“I don’t like tour groups,” she said. What she couldn’t say was that someone in the group might recognize her name, and the whispers and threats would begin again. What she couldn’t say is how much worse it is being lonely in a place where you’ve lived for decades. Besides, she did not come to Greece to see the sights. 

Twenty-two worn marble steps led up to her little apartment. The landlords lived on the ground floor, a fat couple in their sixties, the husband Greek and the wife Danish. They owned the small hotel next door as well. They were curious about her, especially the landlady, but Martha told them only that she was interested in hiking on the island. Probably they wanted to know more, but have mostly let her be, maybe because she paid them four months advance rent when she arrived. 

The island already had a few fugitive oddballs, and Greeks are known to be kind to strangers. A bald Norwegian strode through the village, accompanied by a cigar, from his white villa to the taverna, then hours later staggered back again. A reclusive Russian owned a crumbling compound surrounded by an electric fence. Martha probably seemed the least odd of these. She was well-groomed and sturdy, forty-five, with plain, simple features and pale freckled skin. She looked like she came from a small city in the American Midwest, and she did.

The first week she was here she didn’t leave the apartment. Her arms and legs were weak and rubbery and her head thick and foggy. She felt bruised all the way to her bones, as though she’d survived a car wreck. Her sleep came in patches, and she woke exhausted, as if instead of sleeping she’d fallen into a river and drowned. She was asleep more hours than she was awake, like a cat. 

And at the end of that week, as if summoned, a small gray cat appeared on her balcony. She was very thin, and Martha began to feed her leftovers, bits of cheese, buttered pasta. The cat wasn’t fussy. She ate as fast as a dog.

Another week passed, Martha’s mind blank. She would eat a bite or two and go back to bed. The bed was small and low to the ground, spare, perfect, the kind of bed that a child would sleep in or a nun. She didn’t have a plan for what she would do next. But whatever she did, she would never, ever return to her hometown.

One night, she slept all the way through and woke feeling as tenderly pleased with herself as if she were her own newborn baby, or so it seemed to her—she’d never had children. She was out of coffee and hungry for fresh air. She showered, dressed, then walked through the village until she saw the open door of a café. Inside, it was the size of a small closet. The woman behind the counter, an old woman with dyed blonde hair and a withered apple face, gestured to the tables in the little square outside.

Martha sat. 

The early sunlight stung her eyes. All the buildings in the village were so white and bright. She felt exposed and wished she could curl up under her table. There were at least eight or ten tables, ready for the summer crowds; she was the only customer. At last the old woman appeared with a notepad, and Martha ordered coffee and baklava.

The coffee was strong and pure. The baklava, sticky and sweet with honey, melted on her tongue. When she paid the bill, the old woman smiled, stroked Martha’s cheek and softly kissed it. It was the first time another person had touched her kindly in months and it moved her so strongly that she hurried back to her apartment and wept on the bed.

  She began to go on hikes. Following the ring road above the village, she climbed it to a view of the flat smooth sea. She walked a famous path that wound through the terraced hills down to an ancient bridge, another white village, the blue harbor. Along the way, squat old olive trees with thick, gnarled trunks, huge black bees, wildflowers—poppies, lupine, salvia, clover, daisies, vetch. Familiar varieties, but the colors and sizes of the plants were different from the ones she knew. In her former home (as she was learning to call it), she’d loved to garden. Quickly she swerved away from that thought, because, along with the house, that garden was gone.

She began to eat out now and then, always the midday meal, when a woman alone seems less conspicuous than in the evening. She was beginning to pick up a word or two of Greek, but mostly the chatter from the other tables was as pleasant and meaningless as birdsong. She preferred having no idea what they were saying, felt that her ignorance protected her. Maybe they were saying insulting things about her (that she was ugly or odd) or spreading terrible rumors (that she was a witch or a prostitute); maybe they were even discussing the awful truth (she’d been married to a serial killer)—but as long as they knew that she had no idea what they were saying, they could go on being pleasant to one another. 

Her landlord spent his days at a little table outside the hotel, smoking and passing the time with other village men. His enormous paunch strained at his shirt, but his squashy, seamed face was appealing, those large brown eyes under thick, curling eyebrows. He and the other men would nod and bow or lift their cigarettes in casual salute whenever she approached. Her back prickled as she passed, their gazes like unwanted fingers on her skin. She wondered if among them there was one like her husband, biding his time. 

But it was the friendliness of her landlady, the Danish woman, that really frightened her. She sprang out eagerly from unexpected corners and confided things that Martha would have preferred not to know. How she had fallen in love with her husband on a summer vacation when she was twenty-four and he already had children and a wife. How they moved to another island and opened a gift shop in the big town, and later a hotel. But when the wife died, they had to come back here. And although everyone forgave him, she was never accepted. His relatives spoke to her only when necessary. “Even though,” she told Martha, her voice rising to a pitch, “I raised his children. Yes, me!” 

The landlady leaned so close that Martha could see the untidy clumps of mascara on her lashes. “Martha,” she said. “You have had men in your life?” 

“I’m sorry,” Martha said. “I prefer not to discuss this.”

“Of course, of course!” the landlady cried. But her face flushed; she’d been hurt and made suspicious by this refusal to confide. 

Martha was relieved when, in April, a few tourists began arriving, and the hotel, which had been closed all winter, began to occupy her landlady’s time. Yes, tourists came even to this tiny village, which she had chosen on purpose because her guidebook deemed it “pretty but probably not worth a visit.” At first, there were French and German and British families on Easter break, escaping the cold. Busloads of sturdy older people with walking sticks. Honeymooners. 

Then one day as Martha sat outside her favorite café, enjoying a midday coffee, two young American girls appeared. She heard them before she saw them, although she didn’t recognize the reason for her unease until they rounded the corner in their baseball caps and flimsy shorts–one blonde, one darker. They were laughing and jostling one another. They raced up the steps to the church and posed for selfies, their smiles wide and silly. He had killed three like that, just as young, barely adolescent.

A few minutes later their parents and a lanky bored brother caught up with them. Martha was not glad to have seen them. How foolish of her not to prepare herself for such a moment. Did she think she would never again see another fragile young American girl? She’d become inured to the Greek girls; it helped that most of them were of a sturdy build, like her. She watched the family head across the square, watched the slender flashing legs of the girls, and felt that she would never be safe, that no matter where she fled, innocents like these would find her.

She put too much money on the table and left without waiting for change. Back at the apartment she threw up in the sink. He’d forced one girl to watch while he dismembered another. There was video evidence, inside a file labeled Educational. Everything there on his phone, if only she’d looked. But she hadn’t. He’d never given her any reason to. They hadn’t fought. He’d always remembered her birthday. When he was going to be late, he texted or called.

Martha got into bed and the cat followed, rubbing her hard, furry chin against Martha’s face before settling down on the pillow. The cat had been getting fat and now Martha noticed two rows of small pink nipples along the bulge of her swollen belly. She was pregnant. Martha was frightened. “Oh kitty,” she said, as the cat purred. Whatever would she do with kittens?

Once again, sleep eluded her. Once again, she slept only in snatches. She began to drink the sweet wine they sold in unlabeled bottles behind the counter of the bakery, which soothed and gave her headaches. She stopped eating meals out. She studied her worn face, then took the bedroom mirror off its nail and turned it to face the wall. She was shy and not pretty; her husband was one of the few men who’d ever taken an interest in her. 

The skeptical detective who said, “Didn’t you wonder about that cut under his eye?” Of course, she’d noticed it, she wasn’t blind. He’d told her that he stumbled and fell against the corner of his office filing cabinet. And that other time—the thin scratches on his hands and wrists. Paper cuts, he’d said. Obviously, they weren’t. But she’d willed herself to blindness. Why? Because she’d loved him. Sometimes you look the other way in a marriage. She thought he’d loved her, too, even though she wasn’t tidy, even though she bit her nails.

In bed next to the cat, she plugged her ears against the imagined sound of tiny nails desperately scratching. 

Late one day, trying to exercise herself into calmness, she went for a walk along the ancient path. She liked to bring with her a small pair of scissors to clip wildflowers for bouquets. At a turn in the path with a view of the sea, she stopped in front of a leggy plant with sprays of charming yellow flowers, the tiny petals fringed like lace. She’d never seen this plant before and had no idea to which genus it belonged. When she cut the stem, a stink assaulted her, as foul as rotting meat. Quickly she tossed the cut flower away, but its odor lingered, stuck to her fingers or maybe the tip of her nose. The bad odor seemed a bad sign, a warning of some kind, and she turned back toward the village, striding faster and faster along the path, thistles catching at her clothes. 

Then she heard footsteps behind her and turned, on edge but expecting to see the usual tourists. Instead, a local man, gaining on her. His head was strange, deformed, far too large for his body or his face. She stepped back off the path.

“Good evening,” she said. 

He did not answer, not until he brushed past her, when he turned and displayed his awful brown teeth. He reeked like the foul flower, as if when she’d cut the stem she’d released him from the ground like an evil spirit. “Nai,” he babbled. “Nai, nai, nai.”

Something wrong with him not just physically but mentally. Her heart felt it and raced. She felt, too, the awful justice in this encounter. If he pulled out a knife and put it to her throat and marched her into a dank, deserted building to finish her off, that was how she was meant to die. Or maybe he would beat her head in with a rock. But he walked on and once he was safely out of sight, she allowed herself to collapse onto the low stone wall. 

Monsters can seem like ordinary people. Her husband, her ex-husband, was able to keep that part of himself well hidden. Now that time had passed, she was seeing more clues. Dogs disliked him. He slaughtered gophers with a frightening relish. And the evening he climbed on top of her and said, “Pretend you’re dead,” and she said, “What?” and the thought of her being dead was all it took, he cried out almost immediately. She’d rolled away and faced the wall, thinking, “It’s a fantasy, that’s all. He doesn’t mean it.” That night, he’d cooked them both steaks, large and juicy, perfectly done.

She thought about all the times he was “working late,” and come home exhausted and cranky and smelling of sweat. 

Maybe she’d been in the village too long and the place itself was telling her it was time to leave. She thought about moving to the other side of the island or to another country altogether. Her money might last another year if she was frugal. Soon she would have to figure out a way to support herself, but all she really wanted was to hide.

In her old life these thoughts and her constant fatigue would have sent her straight to the doctor. It rattled her that she felt she deserved to die at the hands of a strange man. What if she had urged her husband to see a psychiatrist; maybe she could have saved lives. Or maybe he would have killed her, too. 

Now she thought, why not just do it myself? Suicide made sense. Back home, many would feel a grim satisfaction when they heard. She had no desire to keep on suffering, nor did she want anyone else to suffer on her behalf. But it was important that her suicide not put anyone to any trouble. If she killed herself in the apartment, it would likely be the maid, poor high-strung Eleni, who discovered her.

She decided to drown herself in the sea.

Early the next morning she took a bus to the harbor town and rented a car and began driving the unpaved backroads. By now it was May and new wildflowers had appeared—lacy white hemlock, delicate pink hyacinths, purple salvias. Their transitory beauty invigorated her, made her feel almost joyful. She thought, “I’m on the right path.”

Late afternoon and the rutted, unpaved road she’d been following suddenly sputtered out in a field of young alfalfa. On the other side of the low stone wall were a neat vegetable plot, orange trees, a small white church, and a sign in English that said, “We do not receive visitors.” But beyond the compound, she saw a narrow path winding up the mountain, on the other side of which, according to her map, was the sea.

Martha parked, leaving the keys on the seat. She wasn’t planning on coming back. She started up the trail, so narrow the plants on either side brushed against her legs. A black-robed figure walked into the vegetable patch and looked up as she climbed. Martha waved and the person lifted a hand. Good. Now someone knew the car was there.

The climb was steep. She sweated even though the day was cool; her heart pounded and her legs and lungs burned. The wind picked up and she felt strangely exhilarated. She imagined leaping from a high cliff, her arms spread, flying through the air, yes, flying, as everyone dreams of doing at least once. The wonderful shock as her body plunged into the sea, the cool impersonal embrace of the salty water, a final revelation in the swirling darkness.

At last she reached the summit and looked down. No cliff. The other side of the mountain stepped carefully down to the ocean in narrow terraces of olive trees. A squat stone building huddled on the lowest terrace, weeds growing on its flat roof. She walked down to it. About ten feet below wet black rocks cluttered the shore. The pearly gray waves were so soft they did not even foam.

The building looked abandoned, the windows and door were simply holes. Peering inside, she saw rusty twists of wire and cobwebs, caught the dispiriting odor of old smoke. She turned and looked down at the sea. If she jumped from here, she would most certainly cut herself landing on the rocks, and maybe break an arm or an ankle and the waves would gently agitate her body between the rocks. It would take hours to die. Hours and hours of suffering. Like the victims.

Along the horizon, the gray sky and the gray sea met and blurred into nothingness. She screamed as loud as she could, the loudest sound she’d ever made, echoes bouncing off the stone walls and down into the sleepy ocean. Not a minute later, an old man dripping with sea water appeared from between the rocks and tipped his hat. 

Furiously she trudged back up the mountain and down the other side, back to the car. The compound was quiet. White smoke spilled out of the chimney of a low white building attached to the church; the scent of incense and creosote. The black-robed figure was gone. When she tried to turn the car around, she discovered it had a flat tire.

She had no phone with her, no wallet, no money. She would have to hike the twenty kilometers back to the village or knock at the door of the church that did not want visitors. She was tired. Back at the apartment the little gray cat was waiting for its dinner.

She opened the short metal gate and plodded past artichoke plants and pea vines, past red snapdragons, a rusty pitchfork. She knocked at a thick blue door and waited. At last, footsteps. The door opened. A large nun with an angelic voice said in English, “My dear. May we help?” Such kindness. She shattered.

Martha rises in the dark, along with the others (three nuns and two novices), for first prayers. Her back is strong and, some of the time, she feels useful. She tries to help Sister Alexia milk the goats, prays again, eats breakfast. After breakfast, she tends the vegetable plot along with Mother Theodora. She’s been here three months now. She knows now she’d never really wanted to kill herself, she hasn’t the recklessness, or the courage. This is her penance—to remain alive and never understand.

Does she believe in God? She doesn’t think so. But when the rest of them pray, she closes her eyes and prays, too. She’s memorized some of the words, others are spoken only in her head. She prays for dead children, and for live ones. She brought the small gray cat with her. The kitten the cat gave birth to lived only few hours, born without a mouth or paws, blind and wet, an innocent monster. She prays for these and for all the other monsters in the world, too, including him, including herself.