“You’re sure you want to talk about this again now?”
I saw his gaze flicker up to my forehead. I silently cursed myself for impulsively admitting I’d hit my own head on the wheel. After several hours’ sleep, it seemed bizarre that I’d both purposefully injured myself and then confessed it.
I nodded, my cheek brushing against the pillowcase.
“It’s a complicated question to answer in a few sentences, when the reason built up over years, over tens of thousands of little encounters, small observations and a dozen or so big, scary experiences,” he began slowly. “If I were to choose one moment when my hatred of Elizabeth began, I’d probably say when I realized that she was unfaithful to me. I was completely sideswiped by that. I was about twenty-seven or so when it happened.”
“You mean that you realized she
and her father—”
“No, I didn’t understand about her and her father until about a year before she died. I’m talking about a more run of the mill infidelity. She slept with more men than I could count over the years. Guys we’d grown up with and gone to school with. My friends. Men her father knew. Men my father knew. Random men in bars. To say she was promiscuous doesn’t capture the reality. She needed sex. She needed the desire of men like an addict needs a drug.
“But I didn’t understand the depth of her cheating immediately. When I first found out, I thought she’d been unfaithful to me one time. I confronted her about it, and she was remorseful. We reconciled, but it wasn’t easy. After a few years though, I was forced to admit the truth: she’d never stopped having affairs, even during that time period we went to counseling, and supposedly were working on our marriage after I’d discovered the one affair. She couldn’t seem to stop herself.
“But as time passed, I couldn’t ignore the evidence anymore. My wife had slept with a good portion of men in the surrounding towns. Sometimes, she went through them two or three at one go.” I heard something in the gruff sound he made, and realized uneasily it was shame mixing with his misery. I thought of that discovered wooden box in the viewing room, with all of the sex-things inside it, and the discs with initials indicating several people’s involvement. Sex recordings. Elizabeth Madaster had taped herself having sex with men.
“I know you must be wondering why I stayed with her,” Evan said, voicing my exact thought. “I wondered the same thing hundreds of times a day during that time period. The sexual part of our relationship had ended.”
“Then why did you stay?” I whispered.
He grimaced. “Sexual promiscuity, sex addiction, and risky sexual behavior aren’t uncommon with people who have been abused. It’s a symptom, just as classic as mood instability or suicidal ideation.”
“But I thought you said you didn’t find out about Noah until later.”
“I didn’t. But sexual promiscuity can be symptomatic of mental illness, as well—depression, bipolar disorder, personality disorders. She was so fragile. I stayed because I was the only thing standing between her and almost certain destruction. I may have come to hate her at times for making a complete farce of our marriage, but I could see she was spinning out of control with her drinking and drug use, her affairs, her sheer franticness. I’d loved her since I was a kid. There was so much history between us. When you’ve loved someone so much, for so long, it’s hard to just not care, to let go when you see her suffering. Because that’s what I saw when I looked at Elizabeth, no matter how much she partied and drank and screwed every man she saw.
“I worried she’d destroy herself, eventually, no matter what I did. Her illness was cyclical. It escalated gradually, until she became increasingly out of control, drinking more heavily, having affairs while I was working in San Francisco. As her mania escalated, she wouldn’t bother waiting for me to leave town. She’d bring her men here, entertaining them in the viewing room even while I was in the house. She drank and took prescription drugs to excess, drove intoxicated, swam drunk—once she nearly drowned. Noah and she went scuba diving once at night for some inexplicable reason no one could ever really explain to me. She passed out when they surfaced. Drug overdose. Thankfully, they were near enough to the coast that I heard Noah’s shouts. We were able to get her to shore. I did CPR, and she revived before the ambulance arrived. For a while, I thought for sure she was dead, lying there on that beach. It was terrifying.
“She had a psychiatric hospitalization after that. She was hospitalized four times during our marriage, in addition to having one substance abuse rehab stay.”
“If she was that out of control, didn’t you, or the police, consider the possibility that she’d committed suicide when she disappeared?” I asked.
“It was a consideration for the police, yes. I believe that because of Noah’s stature in the community, they never seriously followed up with that possibility. Best not to go down that path, if it would only bring more grief to the family. That’s what I imagine the police were thinking.”
“But you never seriously considered she’d committed suicide that night?” He shook his head. “Why?”
“For several reasons. For one thing, I was familiar with her cycles. Too familiar. Her behavior would escalate until it came to a climax, for lack of a better word.” He winced and shut his eyes before rubbing his bunched forehead.
Despite my uncertainty about Evan in that moment, I pitied him. The pain of what he’d endured all those years was fully exposed now. I sensed the cold, relentless fear he must have lived with, given his wife’s condition. She might self-destruct at any given moment. Every day when he woke up, he must have wondered if today would be the day. I couldn’t imagine the hell he’d been through, being married to such a damaged, fragile woman.
And yet he’d stayed.
“She was diagnosed as bipolar,” he said. “I’d take her to psychiatrists and counselors, but she’d eventually stop her medications, and I couldn’t force her to stay in therapy. As a neurologist, Noah was no help in that. He had a strong distrust of psychiatrists and psychologists, spouting all kinds of nonsense about how unscientific mental health treatment was. I was constantly fighting against his influence on her, against its effect on her non-compliance with her treatment.”
“He was the cause of her dysfunction, in large part.”
Evan’s eyes flashed. “Yes. He certainly didn’t want that coming out in her therapy. Plus, it suited him best to keep her vulnerable. Desperate. He hated outsiders interfering with her life. Interfering with his influence over her. He was even jealous of Lorraine, Elizabeth’s mother. He’d poisoned their mother-daughter relationship from the cradle. Maybe Lorraine does have Alzheimer’s, but I’ve always thought she would have eventually gone mad in some fashion, regardless, just from being exposed to that man, day in and day out.”
His bitterness and anger seemed to hang like a mist in the air between us. I knew by now there was nothing I could do or say to make it better, so I just watched him, waiting for him to continue.
“When Elizabeth’s manic cycles would fizzle out, she would become regretful. Depressed. She would come to me and break down. Confess all her affairs, all the sordidness and depravity in which she’d drowned herself. She’d be filled with self-hatred. It was nearly unbearable to witness, given what a confident, strong, and dynamic person she typically was.
“It became our cycle. Just like when we were kids, she seemed to find comfort and some kind of redemption in our relationship. For a period of time—for at least a few months, sometimes for up to four months—she’d stabilize. She’d become the generous, hard-working, charismatic woman that I remembered. It was just enough for me to hope that things could be better for her. For us. Then she’d slowly start to spin out of control again.”
“And at the time of her disappearance, what part of her cycle was she in?” I asked.
“She was in an unprecedented period of stability and health. She’d just undergone an extended hospitalization, and then a substance abuse rehab stay.” He exhaled heavily.