9 - SALT IN THE WOUND
Lacey
The next morning I opened my bank app, or at least tried to, but the password didn't work. I still felt numb, but irritation gnawed as well, because I didn't have time to go to the bank. In the end, I didn’t get to the nearest branch until my already short lunch that Tuesday.
The branch was cold and smelled like carpet cleaner.
A woman named Harpreet sat me down at a desk with a nameplate and a small dish of butterscotch candies and asked for my ID, and I handed it over still in my scrubs with my badge clipped to the pocket, thinking about the echo I had to read at two and whether I'd have time to eat.
"The app locked me out," I said. "It's probably nothing. Somebody changed a password."
Harpreet typed. She had reading glasses on a beaded chain and a wedding ring she turned once with her thumb while she waited for the screen.
Then she stopped typing.
I have watched a hundred people receive news across a table. I know the tell from the other side of it, the half second where the professional face has to decide what it's going to be. I watched Harpreet's face make that decision, and I felt the cold arriving in my hands.
"Dr. Bonds." She turned the monitor a little, then thought better of it and turned it back. "The joint checking and savings were closed yesterday. The brokerage account was liquidated over three months ago."
"There must be a hold on the wire." I heard how reasonable I sounded. "Wires take a day or two, don't they? There's a window."
"It cleared this morning."
I sat with my hands flat on my thighs under the desk, and I asked her the next question in the voice I use to order labs.
"How much?"
She told me.
I made her say it again, because the first time it went by me. She said it again. I looked at the little dish of butterscotch candies.
"The cards," I said.
More typing. Longer this time.
All seven cards were at their limits, and we had high limits.
I hadn't even known we had seven credit cards.
Over a hundred thousand dollars, just in card debt.
There was a line of credit against the house I had signed my name to at a closing table in 2019 without reading it, because Brad handled the money, because Brad had always handled the money, because I was doing my fellowship and I was tired and the papers went where he pointed. It was drawn down to nothing.
"It's all in his name too," I said. "The accounts are joint."
"They are." She said it kindly. "That's the difficulty."
That's the difficulty. Not theft, then. Not a crime with a form to fill out.
A man had taken money out of accounts with his own name on them, which is a thing a man is allowed to do, and I had signed every one of those signature cards myself, cheerfully, in good handwriting, because he was my husband and it hadn't once occurred to me to do otherwise.
Harpreet was talking about fraud claims and disputing the advances and speaking with an attorney, and I was hearing her the way you hear a radio in another room.
My mind had gone somewhere useful and terrible.
It was calculating. Mortgage, twenty-six hundred.
Utilities. The car. Malpractice premium due in March.
My salary was good and my salary was never the point, the point was that everything that was supposed to sit under the salary and hold it up was gone, and I had a house I now owed more on than I'd thought and seven maxed cards accruing interest.
Two hundred and thirty-two thousand dollars in debt, not counting the mortgage. Nine hundred and six dollars in the only account he'd left, my own checking from before our marriage, the one he'd never bothered with, the one with my maiden name still on some ancient statement in a drawer somewhere.
"Dr. Bonds." Harpreet had pushed a box of tissues an inch toward me. I hadn't noticed I needed them. "Can I get you some water?"
"No. Thank you." My voice was fine. My voice was completely fine, which was odd, because the rest of me was shaking. I have run codes with my hands steady. "I'm sorry. I have to be back at the hospital. I have an echo at two."
"There are things we can do. Freeze the remaining account, put an alert on your credit, get a report started. It takes twenty minutes and it's better if you do it now."
Twenty minutes. I looked at the clock behind her head. I thought about the eleven-year-old on my afternoon list and his mother, who had not slept in three days, and who would be sitting in that room at two whether or not my husband had emptied our accounts.
"Do it," I said. "Please. Whatever you can do."
I signed the forms she put in front of me.
I read them this time, every line, which took longer than it should have and which she waited through without a word.
My signature came out wrong on the second one, cramped and unfamiliar, and she said it was fine, and I said I'd like to do it again, so I did.
Outside the branch the day was ordinary.
I was two blocks from the hospital, stopped at a light, when it caught up to me.
Not tears. My chest simply wouldn't take a full breath, and my vision went narrow and grainy at the edges, and I put my foot down and stood over the crossbar and made myself do what I tell parents to do, in through the nose, hold, out slow, again.
I counted it out. It's a good technique.
I rode the last two blocks and locked my bike, washed my hands, and went upstairs.
I read the echo at two. I told the mother what she needed to hear, and it was true, which helped.
At four-fifteen I sat down in the call room with the door shut and my phone in my hand. I got as far as the screen with Dad's name and my thumb hovered, and I put the phone face down on my knee and sat there in the dark for a while.
Nine hundred and six dollars.
The number kept arriving. Not the debt. The nine hundred and six. Because he had known about it, that account, and he had left it. He had gone through everything we had and stopped at the one thing that was mine before him, and it wasn't kindness that made him leave it, it was lack of access.