by Marnie Vinge
“Anywhere but here. I want you out of the house.”
“I’m not leaving the house,” he said firmly.
“Get out, Tom,” she said.
She pulled away from him and he grabbed her wrist, firmly enough that it burned as she twisted away from him.
“Get the fuck out, Tom,” she spat.
“I’m. Not. Leaving,” he said each word as a sentence of its own.
Vanessa turned from the study, sure of her steps, knowing exactly where she was going. He followed her into the bedroom as she walked around the end of the bed to her nightstand. She pulled the drawer open.
“Calling 9-11?” he snarled. “Getting them to throw me out?”
She grabbed the envelope and cut her finger as she felt for the edge of the paperwork she sought. She pulled it from its casing, her blood staining the top corner. She handed it to him, leaning across the bed and dimpling it with her weight resting on one arm.
“Read it,” she said, her words venomous.
Tom snatched the paperwork from her. His eyes flew over the words, absorbing them silently. He said nothing. He dropped the letter on the bed. His hands flew to his face. He rubbed at the day-old stubble forming on his jawline.
“When were you planning on telling me this?” he asked, his voice suddenly filled with the emotion it had lacked earlier.
“I wasn’t,” Vanessa said.
Tom grabbed his jacket and his keys, and he left.
The next few weeks were tense. The unspoken things between them enough to make moving through a room difficult. It felt tangible. Anytime a silence descended between them, one or the other would do their best to break it—to make the situation somehow bearable again.
Vanessa hadn’t contacted Mark. She had no intention of doing that. She didn’t want him to know that the child was his. She didn’t want to upset the life that he’d built with his own family. Any compassion that she felt when she thought of Mark evaporated when she thought of her own husband.
At first, Tom retreated. He kept his distance from Vanessa. He slept on the couch. He kept late hours at the office again. But she didn’t hear any more conversations with his former lover. At least that wasn’t going on, to the best of her knowledge.
What Tom did when he was gone from the house, though, was a mystery.
Finally, one afternoon, Vanessa was sitting on the back patio. It was a warm day for winter. Somewhere in the low sixties. She had the chimenea going, keeping her warm as she read the newest novel from her favorite author. A dark psychological thriller about a woman who killed her husband. Vanessa couldn’t deny that the idea hadn’t occurred to her, too. She understood.
Tom had been gone for most of the morning. He wasn’t teaching today, but Vanessa didn’t really care where he’d gone. There was a part of her that thought it might be better to not know.
But then he appeared in the kitchen. She watched as he put away some groceries that he’d evidently been gathering. She wondered what in the hell he’d done that for. Maybe he planned on making dinner for her in some ill-timed peace offering. She’d felt sick the last two days. Morning sickness that bled into the rest of the day, she thought.
She watched as he boiled some water and then made two cups of tea, his back to her. He left the kitchen and came out onto the patio with them, steaming in the crisp air.
He sat one in front of her and the other in front of himself. He sat down across from her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“An olive branch,” he said.
She reached for the mug, the ceramic sides hot to the touch. She inhaled the scent of the tea. Something strange and foreign to her. Not earl gray and not citrus. It had an earthiness to it. She wondered if he’d gotten it from the health food store that he’d fallen so in love with in the last few years.
Tom had become more and more consumed with his physical appearance as he aged. Though he wasn’t even middle aged yet, he was as vain as a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis. He took up weightlifting, running, and eating a low-carb diet. And Vanessa couldn’t deny that she’d seen a difference in him. But his preference for whole-grain this and gluten-free that annoyed her.
She sighed and tried to be in the moment. Her husband had brewed her a cup of tea. She’d always thought that bringing someone a hot drink was one of the most caring things you could do for them. Hadn’t she told Tom that when they were dating? Had he remembered? Was this his way of trying to navigate their vessel back to the point at which they had strayed from their original course?
She took the cup of tea and pressed it to her lips.
“Good?” Tom asked.
“Good,” she confirmed.
He smiled at her cautiously.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said.
She looked at him, cautious herself.
“Do you still think so?”
“Even more than ever,” he affirmed. He leaned onto the table; his arms crossed in front of him. “I messed up, V,” he said, using the nickname that he’d established for her long ago. Something that she hadn’t heard in years. “I want to make things right between us.”
“Do you mean that?” Vanessa asked.
“I mean it with the entirety of my being,” Tom said, his eyes never straying from hers.
“I do, too,” she said.
“I don’t care that this baby isn’t mine,” Tom spoke the words that Vanessa had longed to hear. “I want us to be a family. I don’t care what happened before.”
“Oh, Tom,” she said.
They finished the tea, talking to each other as though they’d been apart for months. They spent the afternoon curled up on the couch after having sex. Glorious make-up sex that can only be achieved after severely wounding each other. Vanessa thought about that as she ran a lazy hand over Tom’s chest.
“I need to run an errand,” he said.
Vanessa nodded and Tom got up and got dressed. He left her there, running off to do who knew what.
Vanessa stayed on the couch, looking up at the ceiling, making shapes out of the arbitrary lines that she found there. It was only enough to keep her entertained for so long. She needed to get up and move.
Though she hadn’t been pregnant long, she had adapted to the idea of herself carrying a child quite quickly. She loved the thought of being pregnant. The messiness that came with the facts surrounding her child’s conception were something that she tried to mow down out of her mind whenever they cropped up.
Today, though, it seemed like everything was going to be okay.
After Tom had been gone for a little while, she got in the shower.
She didn’t wait until the water was warm. Instead, she stepped in under a cool stream, the temperature shocking her skin and making her gasp. It was one of the creature comforts available to her that still helped to make her feel alive. She cherished it.
Under the shower head she washed her hair and her face. She moved on to shave her legs and it was then that she felt the first cramp in her abdomen.
“Oh, my God,” she said to herself. The words came out immediately, the pain was so great. It felt like a period cramp but more intense. It seized her and wouldn’t let go. She grasped at the handle on the shower door and another one seized her uterus. Something was happening.
She fell to her knees in the shower. The water ran warm around her by now. She knelt in the shower for a moment. She felt dizzy. And then the room went black.
Vanessa woke, the water running cold over her body. She lay in a heap, her legs curled beneath her in the shower, her hair being tugged at by the drain. Pink water gathered around her face. She’d passed out. And the water ran with blood.
She looked around her.
Red stained the wall behind her. A hand print. Her own. She reached between her legs and felt a slickness that could only be blood. The thought made her stomach turn. She yanked her hair from the drain, part of it ripping itself from her scalp. She cried out in pain, reaching for the frayed ends of her hair.
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The strawberry blonde was stained darker with the hemorrhage from between her thighs. Her heart raced, her mind trying to make sense of what was happening.
Cold water and blood surrounded her, the shower becoming a death-like cocoon.
I’ve miscarried.
The realization washed over her like the tide, slow but unstoppable in its momentum. She couldn’t take the thought back. She couldn’t put the blood back inside herself. She couldn’t undo whatever had been done. She couldn’t make things alright.
She and Tom had tried.
They had tried to make things alright. They had tried to put back together the pieces of their broken marriage. And this is where they had landed. This was the place it had brought them to.
Her breathing quickened. She could feel herself beginning to panic. She called his name—Tom’s name. She wanted him to come, to take her to the hospital, for them to tell her that it was just spotting. A lot of spotting. But nothing more serious than that. The pain she felt wasn’t a child leaving her body prematurely. It was nothing. Nothing to be concerned about. She would be alright. The child would be alright. And she and Tom would be alright.
But there was a part of her, even then, that knew nothing would ever be alright again.
She thought of sitting on the patio with Tom. She thought of the scent of the tea. How it had seemed to foreign and unfamiliar, but she had accepted it without even thinking. She wondered where it came from. Where he had bought it.
In that moment, she knew.
And she stopped calling his name.
Part Four
THE WAY IT ENDS
IONE
I watch, horrified, as Tom sinks the knife into Birdie’s stomach and an inch of the blade disappears, swallowed by flesh. She screams in pain, a howl worthy of an animal being slaughtered. It’s agony given voice.
My feet move me forward, working on instinct. The fact that Tom has both weapons doesn’t stall me. I lunge toward him without thinking. The knife retracts from her stomach, blood pooling on the edge and running down to the hilt. He looks at me, his eyes wild, an animal’s.
“Tom—” I begin.
“It’s only fitting,” Vanessa interrupts.
Tom quickly shifts his focus from me to her. The knife hovers in the air, him with a death grip on it. Birdie clutches her wounded abdomen with her good hand. She yowls in pain. The sound is inhuman. It’s not a sound that should come from a person. I’ve never heard it before, and I know this for a fact.
It elicits in me a response that’s at once visceral and maternal. Birdie is not my child, but the desire to protect her like my own is stronger than anything I’ve ever felt. My brain races, calculating what I can do to stop what’s happening in front of me—this horror movie unfolding in real time.
“You want this child just like I wanted ours, Tom,” Vanessa says.
Her words catch me off guard. I vaguely remember that Vanessa lost a child. The instance of me going to Tom after finding out about her pregnancy is crystal clear. It was later in the year that I heard from another former student of his that she was no longer pregnant and that there wasn’t a baby to show for her troubles. I had felt sorry for her then. There was a part of me that knew it would harden her. She would change because of it. And I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to want a child and to lose it.
“This isn’t about that,” Tom hisses.
Vanessa laughs bitterly.
“That’s exactly what this is about, Tom,” she says. “Nothing you can do now can make up for what you did then.” Her voice turns to stone, the words working alchemy on it.
“This child,” Tom says slowly, carefully. “This child was given to me by God.”
She laughs again. The sound is mirthless, chilling. I feel my flesh prickle against the sound of her voice. It’s enough to make me think twice about moving forward again. Something is happening. Something between the two of them has coalesced and now I’m about to witness it boil over into something else entirely.
Vanessa steps forward. Her back to the windows, she moves through the moonlit room. She’s a shadow encroaching on Tom’s space. For a moment I imagine the pair of them like two animals, circling one another, sizing each other up. Birdie sits between them, her eyes shut and jaw clenched, trying to breathe steadily. She brings her hand away from her abdomen, examining the blood on her fingers. It’s flowing freely now.
“This child wasn’t given to you by anyone,” Vanessa says as she nears her husband.
He looks again at Birdie as though the girl will argue his point. As though she’ll say, Why, no. You’re wrong, Vanessa. This was my destiny all along. Birdie opens her eyes. The tears are gone, but something else has taken their place. A fight inside of her roars like a storm. She wants to live. I can see that.
Birdie looks at me. Our eyes meet for only a moment. She begs me in that moment, Do something. And I have no choice.
I lunge forward like I’m catching a football about to hit the ground. I throw my weight into Tom, knocking him over. The knife clatters to the ground and I hear Vanessa scramble for it. The fray is only beginning. I know this.
I wrap my arms around his waist and hold him. My hand grazes the revolver and suddenly I remember that it’s there. My stomach lurches like I’ve seen my own death. Tom claws at my face. He scratches me. I scream as his nail digs into my cheek, a burning sensation there long after his hand is gone.
I snap at him, bite his hand. I draw blood. He reaches for the revolver with the other hand and I fight him.
I grab and claw with everything I have, fighting like it’s for my life because I know that it is. He’s on top of me now, having rolled us over into a stack of paintings. They fall on him, images of abstract portraits an absurd backdrop for the man who wraps his hands around my throat.
I suddenly remember a self-defense seminar that I went to where the woman teaching it said, if someone puts their hands on your throat, fight like it’s life or death, because it is.
I reach for his hands. I scrape at them with my nails, the oxygen in my blood stream leaving me faster than rubbing alcohol evaporating into the air. He relaxes his grip for a split second, and I suck in the air, giving my lungs and brain enough to operate on for a few more seconds. I wedge a finger between his palm and my throat, and I look into his eyes.
It’s not so different, killing someone and making love. I think of all the times he was in just this position, thrusting himself inside me. My back arching and his name under my breath. I looked into his eyes so many times then and I realize suddenly that I never saw him as honestly as I’m seeing him in this moment. Stripped away are the inhibitions of polite society, of law, of reason. All I can see in his eyes is madness.
The man that I loved is gone, an illusion that he sold me. I bought it, turning over all of my self-worth in payment to him. The thought occurs to me that I could die here. That this could be it. And a calmness descends on me. The death anxiety that I’ve wrestled and fought with my entire adult life evaporates just like the oxygen from my blood stream. There is something welcoming in the idea of just letting go.
But then Birdie screams. Another howl like the first. An animal noise. The noise of someone who truly is at death’s door. Something awakens inside of me. The thought of her eyes—the fight in them—makes me struggle like a fish out of water. It makes me want to fight. I can’t die like this. Not here. Not because of him.
I’ve fought too hard for that.
I thrash my body against him, every muscle fighting him. It’s enough that he has to fight back. He bears down on my throat. I dig my nails into the soft part of his hand—the webbing that spans my trachea—and dig in until I feel a slickness. Blood runs from his palm and he grunts in pain, clenching his teeth and squeezing harder. I can feel myself beginning to lose consciousness.
The world goes fuzzy, dim. We are locked in this moment so similar to other moments we’ve shared together. The entirety of our relat
ionship begins to coalesce in my mind. The disproportionateness of it. The way that Tom always held some kind of power over me. At first as my professor, then as my lover, and now as my killer. I’ve never escaped him.
The thought is the last thing I’m able to coherently put into words in my mind. Pressure makes my head feel like it’s going to pop right off my shoulders. My eyes bulge, I’m sure. They water as he chokes me. I hear something in the distance. Someone calling his name. Vanessa, I think.
Then there’s a shout and I see her over him. He doesn’t sense her there. She looks into my eyes and her face fixes itself into a grimace. There’s a jolt and Tom’s hands grow weak. His grasp is broken. His eyes are no longer fixed on some point beyond me. He sees me again. The animal wildness that was there is replaced by something else, something that I know all too intimately: pain.
Tom collapses beside me, curling himself into the fetal position. I gasp and reach for my throat. The lack of pressure is enough to make me giddy. I sit up, like a vampire rising from its coffin, my chest heaving me back to life. I feel the oxygen return to my blood and life runs through my veins.
I look to my side and see Tom, crumpled on the floor. I gather myself and stand. And as I rise, I see it.
The knife is lodged squarely in his spine.
BIRDIE
Birdie reaches a hand down to her abdomen, just beyond the horizon of the curve of her belly. She feels the slick wetness of the blood from the stab wound that Tom left in her. She touches the wound, feeling the separation of flesh, realizing that only an inch or two below that, there is a child. A child that is ready to be born. Now.
A contraction seizes her abdomen. She feels it throughout her entire body. Her shoulder aches with the movement of her muscles. It feels like the world is melting away. She opens her eyes once more and sees Tom in a heap on the floor a few feet from her. A stack of paintings litters the ground. Brittle from the elements, a few of them have torn in different places. She looks over to see Ione rushing to her side.