by Pamela Crane
I felt myself falling more than I saw it, then everything went away, the anger and the regret, swirling into the black hole that the rest of me was floating toward. Somewhere in the bits and pieces of my thoughts, I drifted into my past, into my mistakes, into my fate.
***
I opened my eyes after several blinks, unsure of what I was seeing. Could it be true? Had I finally found my happily ever after?
I was more familiar with this plastic white stick than I cared to admit. So many pregnancies. So many positives. All ending in negative. Loss. Miscarriage. Pain. Anger. But this time … I knew this time would be different because it wasn’t with Noah. It was with someone who wanted a baby, wanted me, wanted us.
It was with Ben, my future.
I pulled up the delicate white panties I had bought for his eyes only. Black lace was for sluts and red lace for lust. White was for the woman you wanted to marry. Pure. That’s who I was. I adjusted the matching bra, and slipped on the floral silk kimono that he liked on me. He mostly liked slipping it off my shoulders, watching it drop to the floor in a pool at our naked feet.
I flushed the toilet and washed my hands with the tangerine scented soap The Durham Hotel provided. Where did they get these? I was in love with the fragrance. Checking my hair and makeup in the mirror, I fluffed up the waist-length blond tendrils just right and dabbed a shimmer of gloss across my lips. Ben loved my hair, often telling me he wished his wife didn’t insist on cutting hers short. He especially loved to pull it during sex when the animal in him came out.
I rubbed the free, trial-size lotion on my hands and bare legs, picked up the pregnancy test, and opened the bathroom door. When I slipped into the hotel room that had become ‘our spot,’ Ben was lying across the modern platform bed holding a bottle of post-coital wine. We always drank and cuddled and talked after sex, and sometimes I liked it even more than the orgasms he gave me. He wagged the bottle at me – oh, not wine but champagne! That was new – and smiled.
On the contrasting red bedside table were two fluted glasses, each one half full and fizzling with bubbles.
‘What are we celebrating today?’ I asked, climbing across the navy comforter toward him. I wondered if he knew. Was I already glowing? I’d have to remind him that I couldn’t drink alcohol.
‘Us.’ He said it so matter-of-factly that it gave me all the assurance I needed to share my own celebratory news.
‘I have something else to celebrate.’
‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’
I took the champagne bottle from his hands and set it on the table beside the glasses. Sidling up to him, I wove my fingers between his. I needed to be close to him as I told him. This moment would last forever, we’d recount it to our son or daughter someday – I was pretty certain it was a girl – and I wanted it to be perfect.
‘Us.’
I held out the pregnancy test for him to take. But he didn’t. Instead he just went still, gawking at it, looking anything but happy.
‘What is that?’
‘It’s a pregnancy test, Ben. I’m pregnant. We’re pregnant.’
Only now did he look at me, and it was with clenched-jaw anger. Only now did he take the plastic stick, and throw it against the crisp white wall.
‘How is this possible? You told me you were on the pill.’
I had told him that, hadn’t I?
‘It’s not always one hundred percent effective. I guess this baby was really meant to be. Our little miracle.’
‘No.’ As if that word simply erased the baby’s existence.
He pushed me away from him. Not our little miracle, apparently.
‘You’re not happy,’ I stated the obvious.
He slammed his fist into the mattress, then rose from the bed, running his hand through his hair like he was trying to rip it out.
‘Of course I’m not happy. I’m married, Candace. How the hell am I supposed to tell my wife I’m expecting a baby with another woman? She’ll never forgive me.’
‘I thought you and I would get married and—’
‘You and I are nothing!’ he yelled over my voice, over my dreams, over our future together.
I felt the embarrassment of tears. How could I have made the same mistake twice, loving the wrong man, a man who didn’t love me back? How could I fall for a man who used me, tinkered with me until he broke me?
Ben stomped across the blue carpet, blue like the water I wanted to drown myself in. I slid off the bed and threw on my clothes while Ben fumed back and forth. When he paced himself out, he spoke, as if he had come up with a logical solution.
‘You have to get rid of it. There’s no other choice. I’m not raising a baby with you, and I’m not leaving Harper. I don’t know how you could be so irresponsible.’
As if I impregnated myself. As if he had no part in it. He turned to me, glaring with such hatred that I felt it seep into my pores.
‘I’m not getting rid of my child, Ben. You’ll just have to come clean to Harper and tell her what happened.’ I grabbed my purse from the red nightstand, knocking over the champagne flutes, and headed toward the door. ‘Or I will.’
His hand reached out, jarring me backward. Flinging me around to face him, he leaned toward me, his face inches from mine. ‘This is your one warning, Candace. Fix this problem, or I will.’
The fingers pinching my muscles tightened until I yelped. ‘You’re hurting me!’ I whipped my arm away, finding five oval bruises where his fingers had been. Ben wasn’t the knight I had thought he was. He was another Noah.
Chapter 36
Candace
The words exchanged at the hotel room cut me badly. But the letter Ben tucked under my windshield wiper later that night ripped my heart out.
I had given him time to reconsider as I drove home from the hotel and spent the next hour weeping in solitude. Flipping through the countless letters Ben had written me over the months, I re-read his poetic professions of love, hating how he had entrapped me with his words:
There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you.
When you want to hide from the world, hide in me.
To my beautiful Candace, whose name means ‘clarity.’
You’ve given my life clarity and purpose: to bring you joy.
I wake up to exist for you. I open my eyes to see you. I breathe to inhale you. You are my reason for each moment.
You once told me that you felt broken beyond repair. Let me mend you. Let me make you whole again.
And so many more, all garbage. All lies. All ammunition for the hatred burning inside me, begging me to end the pain, end the rejection. Except I was tired of being the victim and just taking it. Driven by a fury and desperation I had never felt so strong before now, every cell of my body demanded justice.
Resting my hand on my stomach, I refused to lose a baby again. I had fought far too long for a child, and no fickle, selfish prick was going to take it away from me. I had brooded enough over Ben’s dismissal of me. I wasn’t some rag he could toss in the garbage, and his unborn baby wasn’t some mere inconvenience he could ignore. Maybe if I said the right thing I could win him back. So I texted him, but his curt replies only scratched at the wound.
We need to talk, I texted. I couldn’t let Ben end things. I needed to fight for him.
There’s nothing left to say, he replied.
You can’t walk away. We’re having a baby together, whether you like it or not.
You can’t prove that. And if you try to tell Harper about it, I’ll take the baby and you’ll be left with nothing. No court would give a child to a single, broke psycho, but an upstanding family man with the means to give the child everything … I always win, Candace.
And then poof! That was it. He ghosted me. For the next couple hours he ignored my texts and calls, and with the lengthening silence my anger swallowed me deeper inside of it. He was under the false assumption I would tuck my tail between my legs, admit defeat, and walk away. Boy, did he have a thing or two to learn about
me. I’d been a doormat before, a punching bag, but at least that man had had the balls to marry me. Noah might have beat the hell out of me physically, but emotionally I was still intact because I knew I could leave him if I wanted to. It had just taken me time to build the willpower.
But Ben … oh, Ben killed my soul. He gave me hope, then ripped my emotions right out of me and charred them into black ash. And now he had the gall to pretend like I didn’t exist? To go on his happy way with his miserable wife, stuck in a life of affectionless grief? I had lost babies. My grief was as wide as the ocean and as deep as the canyons. I knew what it felt like. And here I was offering him a new life, a better one with me, a woman who adored him and would do anything for him. How quickly he turned it down when I offered him my heart. No, he didn’t just turn it down. He squeezed it until it popped.
Big mistake, Ben.
He could hide behind the safety of his phone, but he couldn’t hide from me standing in front of him, face to face. Somehow through the exhaustion I made my way to my car. Somehow through the tears I saw the letter he left, tucked under my windshield wiper. I pulled it out, written on The Durham Hotel stationery. He must have written it after I left, not even giving it a full night to reconsider destroying our future! His handwritten goodbye was a loosely veiled threat. As I read the words over and over, the devastation to my soul felt more complete. It was the finality of our relationship, the death of our love.
He carpet-bombed all my hopes and dreams. I had trusted him with my life. I had given him my future. Ben was Noah all over again, a lying, manipulative, egotistical monster who didn’t care how much damage he caused, as long as he won.
I tucked his letter in my back pocket. It was torture to keep it close, but it was also fuel for what I needed to do. I was terrified as I got into my car. Panicking as I drove the short distance to his house. Then, somewhere between parking down the street and the walk to his backyard, I felt resolve mixed with indignation. It was the right thing to do. The only thing to do.
Fate was guiding me. I knew it the instant I found his wife’s car missing from the driveway. I would listen to that little voice this time. I knew where his wife parked, what she drove, where they kept the spare key, and my way around the house from the times Ben had snuck me in for a quickie when his wife had her weekly therapy appointments. When she stopped going, we were forced to get creative. Thank God for hotels.
No more second chances for Ben. No more fake apologies or excuses. He had used up his last. From the back porch I could hear the television blaring. He would never hear my entry above the sound, hopefully neither would the kids. I looked around, wondering how I could sneak in and sneak out undetected. I lifted the planter that he usually hid the key under, finding an empty space with a dirty outline of where the key had been.
The jerk! He was already wiping his slate clean of me. We’d see about that.
A narrow, rectangular window with an old-fashioned floral pattern etched into the glass was close enough to the back door that I could reach the lock to the doorknob. A soundless entry was out of the question. I pulled off my shirt, wrapped my hand in it, and punched through the glass, holding my breath for a full minute before daring to breathe again. No movement inside, no other sounds beside the television. I hadn’t alerted anyone.
With the shirt still attached to my wrist, I fiddled with the lock until I heard it click open. After shaking any glass shards from my shirt, I slipped it back on and entered the house. I followed the sound of Ben’s obnoxious snores, mixed with the voice of the host from Mad Money, coming from the living room, something I would have adored, once upon a time. I had never had the bliss of sleeping next to him until morning, feeling the rumble of his snores against my back, and I never would.
I tiptoed up to Ben’s sleeping form on the wheat brown leather sofa that should have been ours, watching him so peacefully ignorant in his narcissism. How could he sleep so soundly after destroying the woman he proclaimed to love? How could he slumber so deeply after betraying the wife he vowed to love faithfully? Maybe I was doing his wife a favor, too. Though the woman deserved nothing from me. She was the reason he came to me, yes, but she was also the reason he refused me.
I padded into the kitchen, careful not to touch anything. A hand towel hung from a bronze rod, so I grabbed it and selected a knife from the cutting block. The thickest handle would be the biggest blade. Easy peasy. I’d never stabbed someone, but how hard could it be? Especially when they weren’t fighting back.
Returning to my lover’s side, I blew him a kiss and made a wish. I wished that he’d find happiness in the afterlife. As much as I hated him, I had loved him twice as much. But I also couldn’t let him destroy lives without consequence. This was the price one paid. I positioned myself above his rising and falling chest, then raised the knife over my head. I’d need enough force to kill him on the first try. I aimed at his heart, then stopped.
I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t kill a man.
A light blinked on the phone on the coffee table, then a second later, it buzzed with a text message. I picked up the phone and read it:
You can call me the Problem Solver, buddy. About your little problem, I know someone who can make it go away. I’ll be in the wind tomorrow, but you can reach me on this burner phone if you need me. – Randy
Had Ben asked this Randy person to make me go away? What the hell did that mean?
I searched for his text history, but it had been erased. Just like he’d erased me from his life. I deleted the text and set the phone down.
Show no mercy, my father’s words echoed inside my head. Ben didn’t deserve mercy, and he didn’t deserve to live. His heart became a pin at the end of a bowling lane, and with every angry cell I aimed the knife, then plunged the blade down into his chest cavity. I immediately let go and stepped back, waiting for something to happen.
With a gasp he jerked up in response to the impact, mouth open in a macabre circle, then he reached his arms out toward me as blood seeped into his shirt. His fingers were close enough to move the air above my skin, and the fine hairs on my arm prickled at the near touch.
Our eyes locked for the last moment as I watched the man I love die. It was awful and liberating and soul-ripping and powerful being there for his last flittering moments on earth. His arms dropped to his sides, his eyes closed, and gravity lulled his head sideways. Goodbye, my Dark Prince.
A commercial for Mr. Clean ‘Magic Eraser’ – replace your grime with shine! – blared on the television behind me. An omen? Somehow all the mess I’d made of my life would be made clean? I found the remote tucked in the wrinkles of a blanket imprinted with Ben’s children’s smiling faces, and I imagined Ben and I wrapped in the smile of our own child’s face. It was a fantasy that would always remain just that – a fantasy.
Turning off the television, I dropped the room into stark silence. Much better. I needed quiet to focus on how to replace my grime with shine.
I found a bottle of bleach under the kitchen sink and got to work cleaning off all traces of me, going strictly based on what I had learned about forensics from watching thriller movies and police procedurals. God willing, most were accurate enough that I didn’t leave any evidence that would lead back to me. After wiping down the knife with a paper towel soaked in bleach, I placed his hands on the handle. Finally, I wrote a goodbye – a goodbye that would prevent any suspicion of murder.
I knew Ben’s handwriting intimately from the many notes and love letters he had written me over the months. Forgery was a gift I had practiced a lot as a teenager when I wanted to excuse myself from school. I had never imagined putting that talent to use by framing a murder as a suicide. I considered what Ben would have wanted to say, then I remembered he had already said it. To me.
From my back pocket I pulled out the letter he had written to break me. I examined the straight, capital letters, rigid and formal, that he had penned:
Candace,
You saw this coming, didn’
t you? You knew one day it would have to end between us. You can’t blame me for this. You put us here, after all, with your choices and entrapment. It was only a matter of time before we closed this chapter, because it was all that was left to do. You’re not my true love; you never were, you never will be. I tried. I really did. But in the end, trying isn’t enough. I’m not able to manufacture love. We lived on lust, and that’s about it.
You’ll spend the next year hating me, but then you’ll have your baby and move on and be better off without me. You’re tough. But raising a baby together isn’t an option. If you choose to come after me for support, I’ll take the baby and raise it with Harper. You know I have the means to take everything from you, and you can say goodbye to any happily ever after. So take this chance to have your family and move forward. I don’t say that as a threat, but a warning and a promise. I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me.
I love Harper, and that love is enough for me.
Ben
Then I began rewriting it, tracing his penmanship as best as I could, specially adjusted for his beloved Harper, so that she felt the same sharp pain that I did. How darkly poetic that his cruel goodbye to me would be passed on to his wife:
My darling Harper,
You saw this coming, didn’t you? You knew one day you’d walk into our home and find me like this, taken by my own hand. You had to, after all the suffering. All the secrets. All the pain.
You can’t blame me for this. You put me here, after all. It was only a matter of time before I escaped the pain of this world, because it was all that was left to do. I couldn’t carry on anymore … not after what happened. What you did. What I could never forgive. I tried. I really did. But in the end, trying isn’t enough. It’s not enough to erase the past. It’s not enough to blur the memories.
You’ve spent the last year hating me, and I’ve spent the last year missing you. We’re not who we used to be, and I realize now we’ll never find ourselves again. When you lose too much of yourself, there’s no way to rebuild. Moving on without you wasn’t an option, but this was.