Chapter 23: Chapter 23

Everything crumbled apart after the phone call Stan put across to Frank and informed him of Miriam’s scrawny looks. In that call Stan apologized beforehand for using the most fitting adjectives to describe Miriam’s scary appearance. He called her: ‘a bag of bones’ and a ‘scary, pale figure.’ If Stan had not apologized, Frank would have found his description of Miriam offensive. Instead, he discerned the overtone in Stan’s voice, and knew that all was not well. He shabbily finished his business dealings and fled back home. Frank was appalled by Miriam’s thin looks. He found out in all sincerity that Stan was apt in his description of Miriam. Miriam was now a bony, small frame. The hug she gave him when he returned was strangely cold; it was only a brief clasp of bodies. What happened to his beautiful and cheerful wife? Miriam was a distant past of her fleshy and effervescent self.

There was no way Frank could sweep what he saw under the carpet. That night he did not sleep. His face was lined with worry. What bothered Miriam was really deep. When the night was deep, Frank pressed his forehead against Miriam’s and kissed her. The kiss was brief and lukewarm as Miriam quickly backed him. Frank ignored her reluctance and moved his hand slowly across her body. His hand travelled down her silky thighs, but Miriam remained stiff and lifeless. Unable to stand it any more, she exhaled and brushed Frank’s hand aside sluggishly.

‘Please… please, I am not up to this. I am tired and I want to sleep,’ she protested. Frank sat up from the bed and sighed. It was very unusual of Miriam. She was never the lifeless one. Her moments in bed with him were always her most blissful. He shook his head disappointingly.

‘I’ve been away for two months,’ Frank said, sighing. ‘Two months now seems like ages. A lot of things have happened and I’ve been left in the dark. You look a shadow of yourself. You’re not my wife anymore. Look at you; you look like a total stranger to me. What happened to you?’ Miriam looked at Frank sorrowfully. She tried to speak but her tongue shriveled in her mouth. Her collarbones were sharp and jutting out. Frank stared at her and at the hollows in her throat as the silence in the bedroom lingered.

‘Nothing… nothing is wrong with me,’ Miriam spluttered. Frank looked at her pityingly; he had expected her to say more than just the lame reply.

‘How can you say that? Don’t you feel any pity for me and Jessie and Martha? Have I been away for so long? Maybe I really have.’ There was deep-seated sorrow in his heart. ‘I shall let you be. I should have been here. I should have protected you. I should take the blame,’ Frank said, as he slipped under the duvet. The saying that the man, who does not spend time with his family, was not a real man filled his mind. How could he have forgotten that a man, whose corn was roasting in the fire, did not wander too far? Miriam continued to stare at Frank with pain in her heart. They have endured unbearable years and have craved for a male child. They have offered Martha because of it. Now that she was pregnant at last, it was for another man. And painfully, it was in a very disgraceful manner. What would she tell him? How would she bring herself to do that? Frank was her husband and she knew him very well. The sheer thought of another man touching her would kill him. Not to talk of the sad truth that another man’s child was now nestling in her womb. The things he would do and the repercussions of them were too grim to contemplate. She had been dropped in the middle of something she knew nothing about and could not comprehend.

‘I am sorry,’ she moaned, ‘I – I don’t know. I really don’t know,’ Miriam said as scalding tears trickled from her eyes. Frank looked away, backing her, as Miriam sobbed.

Frank rose early in the morning after a troubled sleep. In fact, he had not slept. He had watched Miriam cry all night. As he prepared to go to the office that morning, Miriam was still in bed.

‘Are you not coming to work?’ he asked as he knotted his tie in the mirror.

‘Yes, I’ll not come. I’ll go over to Stan’s for a check-up,’ she said, looking away from him. If it was not for Jonny, whom she was now a pawn in his hands, she would have allowed Frank to make love to her and afterwards break the news to him that she was pregnant. She would tell him the child was his. After all it was only a mother that knew who the true father of her child or children really was. But Jonny was determined not to let that happen. He had threatened to go on a smear campaign against her if she did anything contrary to what he wants. And sadly, Jonny was no pushover. He was a pitiless madman that would make good his threats. But even at that, her conscience would not let her do such a grievous thing to Frank. How would she pass another man’s child to him? How would she live with the guilt of doing that? It would be a heartless thing to do.

‘That’s fine, tell Stan I’ll see him later in the day,’ Frank said, as he took his briefcase and clumped down the stairs. Miriam remained in bed, sobbing quietly. After the disturbing thought of last night, she had decided on what to do. The pain she was going through was intolerable. She had crossed the Rubicon and it was too late to turn back the hands of the clock. Once the cow is milked, there’s no way to squirt back the milk up her udders. She was the fool that learned the game, only after the players have dispersed. Now she would do what she needed to do to make the pain go away.

Miriam rose from the bed and traipsed to the kitchen and poured a cup of juice in the glass. Then she went to the cupboard at the corner. She had put it there. She was very sure. She opened the cupboard and began to ransack it. Slowly her heartbeat increased as she scattered the cupboard in anger and frustration. Then she found the knife and clasped it in her hand. She held it to her face and ran her hand across the blunt edge. She screamed and threw the knife on the wall and it clattered noisily on the marble floor. She returned to the cupboard and shoved the utensils aside. She searched frantically as she sobbed, and finally she found it. It was at the corner, inside the sack. It was a deadly pesticide. She opened it and the sharp fumes filled her nose. She emptied the substance in the juice and shook it vigorously, as it spewed on the kitchen floor. Then she trudged back to the bedroom and placed the juice on the table. Droplets of water trickled from the glass and clustered on the table. The water looked like tiny see-through pebbles. She sat on the chair, staring dolefully into the mirror. She was certain the reflection in the mirror was not hers. Where was the ravishing Miriam? She was the crystal of beauty. Now she looked like an ugly worn-out crone. She remembered the countless times men leered at her. Her beauty was peerless and beyond description. Some ridiculous men had even called her a vamp. If she could go from such peerless beauty, to such an ugly crone in the twinkling of an eye, then what is beauty? It was the proof that beauty is skin-deep, and outward appearance is vain and shallow. A sound character is all that mattered. She still could not believe that all she had worked her fingers to the bone to build in all these years was now tumbling down in her face because of one moment of thoughtlessness. It reminded her cruelly, how difficult it was to build and how swift and easy it was to destroy. It reminded her also of how brittle and brief life was.

There were over a trillion questions on her mind that needed answers. Yet the answers to them were so elusive. Maybe, there were really no answers to them because everyone thinks that whatever happens to a man is his fate. She lived in a world of mysteries, of hidden truths and fiction and of coerced acceptance of barefaced lies. The right to know the reason for all happenings are shrouded in mysteries and dismissed with lame excuses. Are these things this way for man’s good? She still did not know. Maybe, no one really knows or bothers to know. She rose sluggishly from the bed and clasped the glass of juice, her hand curling round the rim. Her heart was thumping in fear. She exhaled and put the cup down and began to pace around the bedroom. Her thought was in absolute mental haze.

Frank had lunch at the Mandarin Hotel, after which he drove to see Stan. Miriam’s strange behavior and appearance was a great cause for concern. Worst still, her reluctance to tell him the truth bothered him the most.

Stan had barely settled on his plump chair when Frank asked him the most unsettling question.

‘Tell me the truth. Do you think Miriam is hiding something from me?’ he asked him.

‘No. There’s none that I know of,’ Stan replied.

‘But she was here for check-up, wasn’t she?’ Frank asked him.

‘Yes. We did some tests on her and found out she had ulcer and high blood pressure. But that was one week ago.’ Frank sighed heavily.

‘I fear that someone has cast an evil eye on my family. Miriam has anything to me. What bothers her is very mysterious. It hurts me when she says it’s nothing. A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing.’

‘Of course, an animal with two horns cannot be hidden in a sack. Miriam cannot say that all is well when everyone knows it’s clearly not. Something is wrong. There’s more to this than meets the eye,’ Stan supported.

‘I agree. Miriam looks very thin and withdrawn,’ Frank said sadly.

‘It shall soon pass. All will be well again. Just because the sun has gone down; it does not mean it will not rise again. Cheer up, my good friend,’ Stan urged Frank. He could have told him the truth that Miriam was pregnant. Yet he could not tell him. From his own perspective, if something was not right with Miriam’s pregnancy, it was not really in his place to tell Frank. Miriam was two weeks’ pregnant and Frank had been away for two months. The unreconcilable nature of that made the pregnancy questionable. There was something Miriam was not telling anyone.

‘I must leave now,’ Frank said restively. ‘I need to go home. I need to know what’s really happening.’

‘I would suggest you don’t push her too hard,’ Stan advised.

‘Of course, I will try not to. But I need to know the truth. An elder does not sit at home and watch the goat deliver in tethers,’ Frank said as he made towards the door.

As Frank drove home, Miriam was staring at his large-framed photo on the wall of their bedroom. A ghost-like and grotesque figure was hanging from the chandelier as she removed her eyes from the photo and stared at the roof. There was nothing there; her mind was creating a false reality of things. However, it was not her imagination that everything that was happening now was Frank’s fault. She knew from the onset that offering Martha for his crave for a male child was wrong. One must never cut the nose just to spit the face. But Frank never listened. Now it was clear that she was right. Everything was tumbling apart. But was it Frank’s fault, too, that she had gone to Jonny’s house and he had slept with her? Was it his fault as well that she let her emotions get in the way? She didn’t know what to think anymore. Perhaps it was her ugly fate. It was the sad and recurring theme of bad things always happening to good people. She exhaled and closed her eyes. That cruel day Jonny slept with her was the day she died. What she was about to do didn’t really matter. She took the glass of juice from the table with trembling hands and slugged it down her throat. Then she traipsed to the bed and clutched her stomach as it rumbled.

She lay there, writhing in sheer pain. Soon she was foaming at the mouth and shaking violently like a fish out of water. She remained still on the bed groaning in pain. Of course, she had made up her mind to die with the secret, to keep the lid on what happened with Jonny rather than destroy her family, or let Jonny have his way. How would she destroy the honor of the house she built with her hands? She had martyred herself for her family. She had kept the honor and reverence of her family intact. There are moments in life that defines us. These moments are not many, there are the rarest. And to her, this was one of them. Doing this for her family was all that mattered. She had made the most of her life.

She had thought of the several instances of history, of kingdoms and empires that were reduced to piles of rubble, of men who went to war and thousands of soldiers and innocents that die, all for the sake of honor. Of what possibility is the sustenance of kingdoms and empires without the ability of self-sacrifice and soulless wars? These are the pillars of growth, survival and honor. For honor, noble men die, kings, princes, emperors, generals of war and the bravest men of the world fall on their swords. Men covet honor, it’s everything to men. So was it for her and her family. Still not everyone would agree with what she had done. In fact, some would say that Jonny drove her to her death. They would say she took the path of cowardice. That she waltzed through the paths of sanity, wisdom and fear and murdered herself because Jonny cruelly drove her into it.

Frank stopped the car at the garage and hurried into the living room. The house was silent as death. Miriam’s cars were parked at the garage. He hurried upstairs and into the bedroom. Everything looked eerie. Miriam was sprawling on the floor and foaming at the mouth. Frank gulped air. Outside by the window, a crow was cawing and a bird was calling as he reached Miriam and raised her from the floor, and shook her violently. The sound of his voice echoed eerily in the bedroom. He took the glass on the table and smelled it, and the sharp fumes of the pesticide filled his nose. He gathered Miriam into the car and drove to the hospital. Tears filled his eyes as he drove. The thought of what had pushed Miriam into taking her own life, preyed on his mind as he sped on the bumpy road.