“Fireworks?” Lieutenant Leggio raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t mean that literally.” Randi glanced at the male officer. His face registered nothing. This wasn’t going to be good cop and bad cop, Randi thought. It was going to be good cop and rudely indifferent cop.
“Josh and I–I don’t think we’ve ever had a good marriage,” Randi began. “It was okay in the beginning, but over time we just found ourselves going through the motions. He never asked me for a divorce and I never sought one from him. I don’t think either of us had the stomach for it, and there was Brie to consider. We both felt like this would tear her apart — she’s a very delicate child.” Randi felt weariness creeping in, even though the interview had hardly begun. “We went to the marriage counselor and tried a few things, but we could never make the marriage what we wanted it to be. So we just kept plodding along.”
“What do you and your husband do for a living?” asked Lieutenant Leggio.
“I worked for a small investment company until I got sick and haven’t gone back.”
“Sick?” asked Lieutenant Selvera.
“Yes. I got cancer a couple of years ago. Cervical cancer. Josh and I didn’t want to have any more kids, so I opted for a radical hysterectomy and post-op radiation.”
“How are you doing?”
“Good for now. Time will tell.” Randi stopped her story to take another suck of juice. She couldn’t use her hands, so she bent forward like the little toy drinking bird in the top hat.
“Go on,” said the female lieutenant, after Randi had swallowed.
“Josh works for a construction supply company.”
“What happened last night?” asked Leggio. “What was the fight about?”
“He flipped out. He does this. Something gets to him and he goes postal. Last night it was news from his mother. She was having dinner with us, as she’s no doubt already told you. Josh’s brother, Stephen, had really started to rake it in with this World Wide Web — based company that he’d gotten in on the ground floor with, and here Josh was, working for the same old walls-and-windows company that hadn’t given him a raise in over two years. It started to be about that, and then it morphed into how lousy his life was overall and how even his marriage was just one big fat joke. And he had only stayed with me because of the cancer, but he was miserable. All this in front of his mother.”
“What did she do? The mother,” said Selvera.
“What she always does. She jumped right to his defense. He’s so overworked and this and that, and of course he should get a handle on his temper, but he has every right to want his life to go in a different direction. Textbook mother-in-law malarkey. I felt that I was being ganged up on — as usual — and so I fought back.”
“How did you fight back?”
“I said that I should have married this guy I dated in college. And Josh said that he should have married some girl he’d known since high school, and this is when things entered uncharted territory. He confessed that he’d been seeing her off and on all through our marriage. Until she died. She also had cancer — the same cancer as me. He wondered why the cancer had taken Teri but didn’t take me, as if this were evidence of some cosmic cruelty directed only at him. I was paralyzed. Not only by the fact that my husband wished death upon me, but by his need to mention this longtime affair he’d had with Teri just to hurt me. So I sought a way to hurt him. I told him something that just came to me in that moment: that cervical cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus. That I’d never slept with anyone but Josh. That only he could have given me that virus — the virus that he had apparently gotten from his old girlfriend. Now I knew why I had gotten cancer and who had given it to me. I knew that if I had died, he would have been responsible for my death. Did Agnes mention this? You should have seen her face when I said it.”
Randi took another sip. “This juice is too sweet. Can I just have some water?”
Lieutenant Leggio glanced over at the two-way mirror and nodded. A moment passed and then another officer entered the interrogation room carrying an open plastic water bottle with a straw bobbing inside. He set it down in front of Randi and left.
“Tell me about this morning,” said Lieutenant Selvera, after Randi had taken a long drink of water.
“He was still angry. I was downstairs when he got up, getting Brie ready for my next-door neighbor Adelle. She takes Brie, along with her own three kids, to a summer day camp in Shaker Heights that her sister runs. Adelle came and got Brie, and then a few minutes later I could hear him upstairs banging around. Then he comes downstairs and goes into the den and all of the sudden there he is standing in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. He’s giving me this look — like the way he looks at the cat when she goes on the rug. He’s holding the three remote controls that go to each of our three television sets in his hand. He yells at me: ‘How can all three of our TV remotes be broken at the same time? The law of averages says that’s an impossibility.’
“‘It’s probably the batteries,’ I say. I tell him I’ll go to Radio Shack and buy replacements.
“He sits down at the kitchen table and starts to take out the batteries, telling me I should take them with me or I’ll get the wrong ones. The sliding part doesn’t come up very easily on one of them and this ticks him off. And then he says he can’t trust me to do it right — this is just plain meanness on his part — and he stuffs them in his pants pocket and says he’ll stop by Radio Shack on the way home from work. I tell him I’m sorry about what I said the night before and he says he still wonders if we’re going to be able to stay together until Brie goes off to college. I notice that he’s cut his neck shaving.
“‘I was watching that goddamned Bigham mutt taking a shit in our backyard. We should have fenced in that goddamned yard the day we bought this house, but we didn’t, and now all the neighborhood dogs come over at their goddamned leisure to use it for a toilet. I guess my hand slipped. I’m going to shoot me a dog one of these mornings.’
“I got him calmed down. I got his oatmeal and coffee. He ate. Things seemed to be getting back to normal — or at least what we call normal. There was so much that we needed to address from the night before, but I was just happy that we weren’t at each other’s throats anymore. We didn’t have to love each other, I thought, but there had to be some way we could learn to tolerate each other while we were still stuck together.”
Randi got quiet for a moment. She was replaying the conversation in her head. She had said all the right things and Josh had stopped being hateful, had looked a little contrite even, as the two sat staring at one another in silence across the table. Suddenly, the silence was shattered by the sound of a dog barking in the backyard.
“He flew out of his seat and threw open the back door and went after the dog — I don’t know whose dog it was. But he literally chased that dog out of the yard and halfway down the block. He was panting and winded when he got back. I was standing on the patio watching him. I was about to ask whose dog it was this time, when suddenly he burst into flames.”
“Spontaneous combustion?” asked Lieutenant Leggio, shaking his head skeptically.
“Yes.”
“You know, Ms. Bryce, that we don’t believe you.”
“But that’s what happened. I saw it.”
What was to be done? Randi had watched this terrible thing happen to her husband, she had been snatched up before she could see him at the hospital, before she could tell him that she would stand by his side just as he had stood by her side through the cancer. It is the thing that spouses do. Even those who no longer love each other. Randi worried about her daughter, who was, no doubt, worried sick about her mother and father while in the temporary custody of her grandmother. It was a horrible situation made even worse by the alarming accusation leveled against Randi — that she had somehow set her husband on fire.