Pursuit by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802147929
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

III

Testimony

Don’t ask. Don’t make me see her.

She is gone, she has been missing for fifteen years. For most of my life.

I have learned to live without her …

When we married, I knew it was wrong—I knew that I did not deserve happiness with you.

I don’t believe that there is Heaven, as you do.

But there is Hell.

The Suicide

When you reciev this my brains will be blownout.

Will that make you happy, Nicola?

I am doing it for you, Nicola. To make you happy.

L.

Angry-scrawled in blue ballpoint on the reverse of a Crayola-bright postcard of the Rocky Mountains, Wyoming. Her eyes take in the words, her brain resists comprehending.

Who’d sent this? Who?

Then, the shock of what she has read sweeps over her. She is light-headed, reeling. Hears her fingernails scrape down the kitchen wall and finds herself sitting, hard. Sinking onto a chair. Panting.

“No. Oh, no. No …”

She rereads the words. Stares at the photograph of mountains, scrubland, vivid-blue sky ribbed with clouds—colors too bright, pretty. The card slips from her trembling fingers, falls to the floor at her (bare, chilled) feet.

She is stunned. Disbelieving. Yet—it is unmistakably Lew’s handwriting, and it is unmistakably Lew’s voice.

More than once he’d threatened to kill himself. Since before the separation. Many times after the divorce.

Himself, and her. And (possibly, unforgivably) the child.

We’re all so unhappy, better for us to die together.

Just give a sign, Nicola.

I’ll be waiting.

A sign! She’d had no idea what he meant.

He’d left Chautauqua Falls at least three months before. After he’d tried to force his way into the house, to see their daughter. Nicola had been at the community college at the time, teaching an evening class; her friend Dominique had been watching Miriam. Dominique called 911 but Lew had disappeared.

Next day, Nicola discovered a crowbar in the bushes beside the front door.

She’d been terrified that Lew would return. Though she’d spoken with police officers several times they didn’t appear to take her very seriously; she had the idea that they knew Lew, or Lew knew them, in some capacity that excluded her. She was the complaining (ex)-wife, the hysterical (ex)-wife, unreliable and irrelevant.

Invariably she was asked if Lew had struck her, or their child. Had he been violent and smashed things, was he an alcoholic, did he use drugs, did he stalk her, did he threaten to kill her, what specifically had he done?

Yet it never seemed to matter, whatever she told them. How many times she told them. Until Lew actually injured her, or their daughter, or destroyed property in a way that constituted a crime, or involved others in his threats, the police did nothing.

After finding the crowbar in the bushes Nicola fled with Miriam to stay with friends for several days, elsewhere in Chautauqua Falls. She petitioned to family court to be granted an injunction against her ex-husband, to forbid him approaching her or Miriam or attempting in any way to make contact apart from his visitation rights with Miriam. But by then, Nicola had reason to believe that he’d left Chautauqua Falls.

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