A Couple of Blocks Past the Big Failing Mall

When she received word that Mark had, as the newspapers put it, taken his own life, Jennifer of course made a big display of grief, all of which was genuine. But the news was at least a little bit pleasurable too. She’d been aching for months to go through his personal stuff. and to discover all the secrets she’d suspected him to have hidden the past few years.

She’d become suspicious when, after going out maybe once every month or so during the first half-dozen years of their marriage, Mark had suddenly started wanting to go out two or three times a week. No restaurant favourably removed in the Tribune-Messenger had to wait more than a week or so to welcome them. No new movie opened at the big cineplex at the mall without their seeing it. They attended the local amateur theatre company’s every opening too, and from their concert-going, you might have concluded they enjoyed everything from Norwegian death metal to the local symphony orchestra, even though all the couple’s higher-brow friends seemed to agree the orchestra lacked lustre. Jennifer had felt immensely uncomfortable surrounded by multiply pierced and tattooed 19-year-olds at the death metal concert, and was unable to describe herself as having enjoyed the music very much. Mark felt it important that they give all sorts of music a chance. They even went to clubs, and saw a succession of dreary blues bands consisting of grizzled old fellows in lank grey ponytails and bald spots. Mark seemed to have become interested in the blues almost overnight.

Going out as much as they did, the couple had for a while pretty much kept the local babysitters in fanciful cellphone covers and false eyelashes. For reasons unclear to Jennifer, Mark took a great interest in whom they hired, to the point of wanting to see photographs of those Jennifer had in mind. After seeing them, he pronounced a couple unsuitable, explaining that it was just a feeling he had about them. He ruled out a couple for living too far away, but the fact was that they were nearer than Krystal, whom, for reasons unknown to Jennifer, Mark regarded as A Real Find. 

He became a very cautious driver, though not with Jen as his passenger. It seemed to take longer and longer for him to give their favourite babysitters a lift home at evening’s end. Arriving home, he would explain, with bristling impatience, that the roads had been icy, or that engine had overheated, as it never did when Jennifer drove the car.  As a parent himself, he said, he was keenly aware of his responsibility to get other parents’ daughters home safe and sound. Jennifer was herself Mark’s mother-in-law’s daughter, but she didn’t envision pointing that out doing anything other than making him defensive. Going out so often seemed to have made him very touchy. 

Turning on Mark’s computer for the first time 62 hours after his funeral, after the twins had been read their bedtime story, been assured yet again that Daddy was watching them from right beside God, in Heaven, and been tucked in, Jennifer immediately found herself stymied, as she turned out to need Mark’s password to actually open anything of interest. She tried his birthday, without success, and then the twins’ birthdays, ditto, and even her own, double ditto. 

She talked the next morning to one of the IT hotshots at work, Lothian, whom she’d been surprised to see, from a distance, at the death metal show, the one with two pierced eyebrows and a pierced tongue. He turned out to be very shy, and almost unnervingly eager to please. Having figured out passwords for several people in the office, he had worked up a questionnaire, on which Jennifer had to identify Mark’s favourite sports teams, any former girlfriends he might have mentioned, and the names of streets on which he’d lived, among a great many other facts Jennifer would never have imagined potentially useful. She imagined it might take Lothian several days, but when she got back from lunch, she saw he’d already emailed her nine passwords he thought might work. She told her supervisor she wasn’t feeling well, and would work from home the rest of the afternoon.

The fourth of the passwords worked, and Jennifer felt a little rush of pleasure. But it was short-lived, as the password that had logged him onto Mark’s laptop as a user opened neither his Facebook nor his Gmail account. The seventh of the passwords opened the Gmail, though, and the third his Facebook.

She couldn’t find a single incriminating personal (that is, not visible on the timeline) message on Facebook, but what a wealth of stuff she found in his Gmail! Krystal, one of the babysitters he’d encouraged Jen most insistently to book, had sent him photographs of herself in a bikini. She hadn’t really had the body for a bikini when the photos had been taken, but Mark had never been a boobs man. She wasn’t 18, as she’d said in her response to Jennifer’s online babysitter-wanted ad, but 15, and a student at the local community college. Digging deeper, Jennifer discovered the girl had responded to Jennifer’s ad at Mark’s urging. He’d also urged Charisse, whom Jennifer had found unpleasantly cocky (and now she knew why!), and Devora to respond to the ad. Jennifer felt as though she might be sick. 

But she felt terrific in comparison to how she felt on realising that both Krystal and Devora lived within a two-mile radius of the home Jen, Mark, and the twins had shared, and that Mark had, since the previous April, been renting a studio apartment over on Drummond Avenue, a couple of blocks past the big, failing mall, to which it might have taken him 45 seconds to drive. 

It occurred to Jennifer that it wouldn’t require much effort to find more on Mark’s hard drive that would make her feel as though doused in ice water or punched in the belly. Fearing she’d be unable to resist the temptation to learn more of her husband’s squalid little secrets, she thought of taking the laptop to work and having the IT goth erase the hard drive, her understanding being that when a lay person tried to do so, she only obscured the directory. 

She wondered how much Lothian might charge to infect the three girls’ hard drives, and tried to find solace in the thought that she wouldn’t be attending any more death-metal concerts, or club performances by grizzled old goats in lank grey ponytails. It didn’t work terribly well, but don’t they say that time heals all wounds?