So. I decided to write this next flashback about Jane's wife. However, I was very reluctant to break the unwritten code of Mentalist fanfiction, which appears to be that no one ever names Jane's wife. So prepare yourself for a whole lot of pronouns!
Interlude
It was winter the first time they met.
She was dressed in a frosty blue blouse and grey jersey slacks. One of the many faces turned up towards him, watching, amused, smiling.
He didn't remember much from the rest of that day, except the one boy who kept staring at him intensely, trying to second-guess his tricks. That was always endearing. Jane had given him an extra chance just for trying. Who knows, someday perhaps he'll be on the opposite side of the table. As it were, the boy got up rather sheepishly and sauntered down to join his friends.
That was it. That was the moment. He was grinning after the kid, content in the flow of the applause and the warmth of the spotlights to linger for a few moments in inaction. The boy didn't use the stairs—he leaned down, put his right hand on the edge of the stage, and jumped. Except Jane never saw him jump because a faint movement in the dim background caught his eye.
It was she. The second to top button on her blouse, more specifically, glimmering faintly red from the spotlights.
And so, on a lark, he picked her for the next act. It was rather scandalous, actually. There were easily a hundred hands waving in the air, but instead Jane ignored them and headed straight over to the edge of the stage. She realized he was quite exclusively looking at her when he was about two feet from the end, and then she smiled even more broadly from embarrassment, glancing to her left and right as if hoping someone would grab her and say to the strange stage performer advancing nearer and nearer—"No! You can't have her." But it didn't happen. Instead he squatted down before her and returned her smile. He held out his hand.
"Well?" he said.
And, for some reason that no one will ever understand—not even herself—she took it. They had lunch the next day.
---
It was accidental, actually. Or so, until the second month of their marriage on a warm summer night when they lay under the covers playing "two truths and a lie", she had thought. She was stopping by the grocery store on her way home from the optometrist—out of olive oil again—and saw him in aisle seven looking up boxes of cereal. It registered in her mind, but she didn't feel like spending any quality time in a grocery story, and so she hurried past without a word. But she thought, roguishly, that she'd like to see him pull that from her ear. Vegetable oil, corn oil, olive oil. Check.
When she hurried from her aisle she nearly ran into him, but he was busy comparing two types of birdfeed and didn't look up when she said "Sorry," and brushed past him. She stepped into line at checkout aisle four. She checked her watch: one-fifty. No wonder she was hungry.
"Miss?" interrupted a voice quite close behind her. She turned.
The familiar face broke into a look of delighted recognition.
"Hello—it's very nice to see you again."
She tried to look equally surprised.
"Oh, hi!"
Was it her, or did his smile grow imperceptibly wider?
"Here," he said, dangling a ring of keys in between them, "you dropped this."
"Oh," she said again, bemusedly accepting the keys, "thank you."
That's funny. She didn't recall hearing anything…
("You jerk!" she laughed, thumping him hard with his pillow, "the beginning of this relationship was based on lies."
Her husband caught the fluffy weapon and its warrior in a quick embrace, and said laughingly into her hair:
"You don't know the extent of it; that was just the beginning."
That warranted another good thump.)
The stranger shrugged it off charmingly.
"You hungry?"
And for the second time, she had not a clue why she surrendered to so capricious a whim.
---
On Saturday they took a stroll in the preserve. He brought rolls—home made he claimed, but she had her suspicions—and they ate them in napkins as they walked along the wooded path.
"So tell me something," she said in between bites. "How long did it take you to learn that trick?"
He looked at her, chewing slowly.
"Which one?"
"You know—the one where someone sits in the chair and you tell them to think of an image and mentally send it to you, then you gesture all over the place with your hands, like—oops. Sorry,"
She bent quickly to pick the stub of a roll from the ground.
"That's okay; there's a lot more."
"Thanks."
She helped herself to another. The dough was warm and comforting against her hand. Jane watched her eat.
"It's a simple suggestion exercise," he answered serenely. "You mention something before the other person has a chance to think, and so their response will most likely be altered based on your suggestion. I use it sometimes in my job as a psychic—
Here he paused and looked at her carefully.
She smiled in puzzlement.
"Psychic?"
He hesitated a little.
"It's not real," he said finally, "I use suggestion to help my clients learn to appreciate my supposed psychic powers—
"Do you ever feel bad?" she cut in suddenly. She was in a contemplative mood.
He raised his eyebrows at her.
"It comes with being human, I hear."
She chuckled.
"No, I mean—do you ever feel bad about deceiving people all the time?"
"Why?"
"Well, you never explain to them what's going on because it's a big 'magician' thing that has to be kept secret, and then you might get some people to really believe in things that have no stake in reality."
He tilted his head briefly to the side in a pleasant gesture of apathy.
"What of it?"
"You're hiding the truth from people,"
She stopped in her path to face him, her face oddly serious, but calm.
"Sometimes people need the truth in order to move on, Patrick."
"It's not that serious," he said laughingly, somewhat taken aback.
Her eyes held some unformed question, and they peered into his searchingly.
"It's not that serious," he repeated, more confidently. He smiled.
"Oh, come on—are you saying you don't think it's somewhat amusing that people can be deceived into believing things about ghosts and spirits just because a stage performer claims to be able to communicate with the dead?"
She returned the smile and reached down for his hand. Their fingers intertwined carefully, meticulously.
"You're not a stage performer," she said softly. Their foreheads were close.
"I beg to differ," he replied in a whisper.
And then they kissed. In retrospect, it did seem like pretty odd timing.