The Coworker Who Knew My Wife

The river

She stopped trying to leave for almost two years. And then she got pregnant, and lost the baby in the sixth month, alone, because Boyd would not take her to the doctor in time, and something in her that had been bending for years finally broke clean off.

She said she decided in the hospital, lying there with the nurses being gentle with her the way nobody had been gentle with her in years, that she was going to get out or she was going to die trying, and that either one was better than going home.

But she could not just run. He would find her. He always found her. And he had told her what it would cost, and she believed him.

So she did not run. She drowned.

There was a low-water bridge over the Current River between the hospital and their house, the kind that goes underwater every time it rains hard upstream. It had been raining for three days. On the drive home from the hospital, alone, she stopped Boyd’s second truck on that bridge with the water already coming up over it, left the door open and her purse on the seat and her shoes on the bank, and walked two miles in the dark in her stocking feet to a truck stop where a waitress she had once been kind to worked the night shift.

The truck went into the river that night when the water came up. They found it a quarter mile downstream two days later. They dragged the river for a week and never found a body, which surprised no one, because the Current takes people and does not always give them back.

Boyd Rickert told everyone his wife had driven off the bridge in the flood. The sheriff believed him. Her mother believed him. Danny, who was seventeen by then, believed him. There was a funeral with an empty box. Her mother put a stone in the Beckum cemetery with Rae Ann’s name on it and a birth date and a death date, and she visited it, Danny told us, every single Sunday for the rest of her life, which was not a long life, because she died of a stroke six years later, still grieving the daughter she thought the river took.

And Rae Ann Colter, who was not in the river, rode out of that truck stop in the sleeper cab of a lady trucker named Pearl who asked no questions, and got off in a different state, and became a woman named Nora.

Why she never told me

She built the new name carefully. The waitress had a cousin who knew how such things were done in those years, before everything was a database. A new history, a new past thin enough to hold up in a place where nobody would ever check. She waited tables. She cleaned houses. She moved north, and then she moved north again, always another county, always a little more distance between herself and the hollow where Boyd Rickert still lived, still worked at the quarry, still, for all she knew, waited for her to make one mistake.

She came to Delford eleven years before that Fourth of July because she saw a help wanted sign in the window of the Delford Diner and because it was the smallest, plainest, most out of the way place she had ever seen, a place where a woman could disappear into an apron and a Sunday pew and nobody would ever think to look for a dead girl from two hundred miles south.

I met her at that diner. I came in for the meatloaf special and I left in love, and I spent six months finding reasons to order the meatloaf special until she finally agreed to let me take her to the Delford Fair, and I have told that story a hundred times at a hundred dinner tables as the luckiest day of my life.

She told me, sitting at my grandfather’s table with her brother crying beside her, why she never told me the truth.

At first, she said, because she did not know me, and you do not hand a stranger the one thing that can get you killed. Then, because she was falling in love with me and she was terrified that the truth would make me look at her differently, would make me see the beaten girl from the hollow instead of the woman I thought I was marrying. Then, once we were married, because every year that went by made the lie bigger and the telling of it harder, and because she had convinced herself that Rae Ann Colter really was dead, that she had drowned in that river, that there was nothing left to tell.