by Lucy Auburn
"She raised you like this, didn't she? Penelope, that hippy with her head in the clouds, too stupid to train her daughter right." He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed hard, until I had to twist out of his grip. "The way you acted in front of my friends was absolutely uncalled for."
"I'm sorry." I stared him down, not meaning the words one bit. Not anymore. "I apologize."
He sneered. "Sorry isn't gonna cut it." Reaching out, he snatched my phone from my back pocket and put in the code—something he'd asked for when things were still good, which I'd been afraid to change ever since. "You need to apologize to my friends. On speaker phone. So I can hear you. We're calling Benny first."
Horror and dread filled my stomach until I was nauseous. The thought of having to apologize to all his friends over something inane, a fault of mine he'd invented in his head, horrified me.
It was always worse to see our relationship through other people's eyes than to view it through my own. The pity, the confusion, the smug satisfaction—no matter what reaction they gave, it made my skin crawl. They never saw me; they only ever saw the victim they created in their head, the one who fit their little narrative.
The thought of apologizing to Jack's friends made me feel so small I thought I might vanish.
And at the same time, it made me so angry I could've killed someone.
I'd been getting angrier and angrier by then. It was like a rising tide within me, pushing boats further out to sea, a raging storm with no control. The anger was just as familiar to me as the fear by then, and I didn't know where to put it.
Except on him.
So I looked him in the eyes and said, "No," bracing myself for what would come next. His hands on my neck again, maybe, or twisting my arm behind my back until I cried out—that was a favorite of his.
But what came next was something new.
With a placid expression on his face, as if he was taking out the trash or handing me the mail, he punched me closed fist across the face.
My head rocked back at a mile a minute. That feeling—that's the kind of shit that you'll never forget. The kind that turns you into a different person in an instant.
Blood boiling over, neck aching something fierce, I bared my teeth at him like a wild animal and hit him right back.
There's nothing in the world like your hand or fist or foot connecting with another person's body. To me, it was like a Wall Street banker's first bump of cocaine or a sorority girl getting her first good dick. It woke something up inside me, something I didn't know existed before, a hunger to hurt anyone who hurt me. Maybe even if they didn't hurt me.
The anger didn't flicker or falter when Jack stared at me in hatred and roughly grabbed the arm I'd used to hit him. I still felt its strength coursing through my veins as he told me, "You shouldn't have done that."
"I'm going to turn you in. It's time I finally do it."
"Really?" He sneered, motioning towards his face. "You'll never get anywhere because of that temper of yours. All I have to do is point to this bruise and I'll get off."
Ice cold anger froze me as I realized he was right. But still I protested, "It can't be that easy."
"It will be. No one will believe a mess like you next to an upstanding citizen like me. Even your parents like me better than you." Squeezing my wrist, he held me so tight I felt my bones creak. "Look in the mirror, Ellen. You're the reason why you're in this mess."
"No. You're wrong." Flailing in his grip, I raised my other hand to hit him with that too. "All of this is your fucking fault."
"Is it?" Jack tilted his head. "Because you could've left anytime. Could've walked right out that door if you wanted to. Except you don't want to—you're too lazy to pay your own bills. To make your own way in the world. Too temperamental to hold down a job. Too angry at the world to live in it."
"That was when we were teens," I protested, hot shame splashing my cheeks as he brought up every embarrassing thing I'd believed about myself, us, and the world around us when I was too young and stupid to know better. "I've learned since then. I have control."
"Do you?" Tilting his head and narrowing his eyes, he let go of me so fast that I wheeled back, the force of my constantly trying to tug out of his grip catching up to me. "If you have so much control now, Ellen, then don't hit me. No matter what I say."
I didn't even agree to his terms before he was calling me the most fucked-up things you can imagine. He created slurs where there weren't any, and used foul words when they sufficed. Every name in the book fell from his lips: bitch, slut, whore, cunt, used-up rag, chewed piece of gum, dumbass, moron, everything you can imagine. He said my vagina smelled like rotten rags; he told me that when he fucked me he had to hold his breath.
I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth. My anger grew anyway.
I told myself I would regret attacking him. But it did nothing to quell the heat inside.
Throwing myself at him, I screamed like a banshee. There was a brief moment of smugness on his face before my hands closed around his meaty neck. Blonde hair flying over my shoulders, I reared back and head-butted him.
Yeah, that's right. I hit his fucking fivehead with my entire face. Bet you didn't see that part on Twitter.
He got me back for that. With a snarl, he grabbed my wrist and twisted it around until bones creaked and a scream left my mouth. To keep the neighbors from showing up at our door a second time, he put his giant ham hand over the lower half of my face until I swallowed the screams. Tears poured down my eyes as he ground my wrist bones together. I tried kicking at his shins and knees, anywhere I could reach, but he didn't seem to give a shit. Nothing fazed him—he had that look in his eyes, that mean look of pleasure only sadists get when they're enjoying your pain. The fight just made him harder.
"Oh, Ellen," he said as he grabbed my other wrist and twisted both of my hands together, holding me fast like I was a little kid and not his fully grown girlfriend. "You'll never change. And you'll never leave me."
For a moment his palm slid from my face, and I reared back, gathered as much moisture in my mouth as I could, then spit right in his face.
The wetness of it dripped down to his chin. There was shock in his eyes for a brief second—I don't think he realized how much vulgarity I was capable of—but the shock quickly turned to a cold, quiet rage.
He didn't flail or snarl or yell at all, which was how I knew he was going to kill me. I felt it deep in my bones, the way that one aunt everyone has can tell when a storm is coming, or how birds go quiet when bad things are happening in the woods. It was marrow deep, this sense that I was about to die, and it woke something in me besides the anger.
Something I'm not sure I understand, even now.
Another side of me took over. The side that had never been beaten or mocked, kicked or punched, but most importantly the side that never loved him. Some part of me that always loathed the way he put napkins in his lap and cringed at the sound of his laugh. A cold and distant Ellen, who felt nothing for him—not even hate—because that was below her.
I felt the cold, still water of this other Ellen settle over me and sink into my bones. She didn't flinch when he backhanded me across the face so hard my teeth rattled. And she didn't cry out at all when he twisted both my wrists behind my back and jerked them downward until one of my shoulders was dislocated.
Just like, deep in my bones, I knew he was gonna kill me, I knew something else. Something primal and undeniable. A sense you get only when you're close to death, and you're made a certain kind of way, not quite right inside.
I knew how to kill him.
As he pressed his hard-on against my lower back, his breath hot in my ear, that horrible voice of his calling me terrible things, I coolly observed the room around me. I made a plan. And when he reached up under my shirt to fondle my breasts with one hand, squeezing my dislocated shoulder with the other, I felt triumph instead of pain.
His lust was his weakness.
He let go of me
just to grope my body—the same body he intended to kill, no doubt as he did terrible things to me, things bad men tell themselves they deserve to do to their women. What he didn't realize is that when he released my wrists, he didn't release the Ellen he met when we were both teens.
Something else was freed.
Someone brutal.
Before he could even blink, I grabbed the hand on my shoulder and twisted his fingers back hard, jamming them until I felt things break. He snarled and raised his other hand to slap me, but I dropped down low so all he got was open air and the wall behind us.
I moved like something out of a movie. Some kind of badass warrior woman. He tried to kick me, so I grabbed his foot in my hand and flipped him down.
Then I saw my opening. I'd already mapped out my surroundings. It was so easy to run around the kitchen island, grab the long chef's knife in the butcher block, and tighten my grip on the handle.
Jack got back up on his feet, saw the knife, and laughed. "What do you think you're going to do, stab me to death? As if you had the strength."
He might've been right about the old me. The me that loved him. That girl who liked getting fresh flowers when he came home from work and daydreamed about the baby she thought we were going to have. Who believed, if she was better, he would love her all the time, and not just some of the time.
I wasn't that girl anymore.
I'm still not. I don't think I ever will be again.
Not after what I did next.
With a warrior scream, like some kind of Amazonian woman, I rushed him. He watched me with cold eyes. As I raised the knife in my left hand, the one without a dislocated shoulder, he whipped his hand out to grab my wrist. His strength was brutal and overwhelming; even with all my anger and rage, he held me tight, and I couldn’t fight him off.
So I took the knife in my other hand, rippled the muscles of my shoulder until my bone went back in its socket properly, and stabbed him with my right hand.
There was a look of shock on his face as the knife slashed through his T-shirt, bit through skin, and skittered across his clavicle. The feeling of metal hitting bone was a new one for me, and it startled me enough that I almost forgot what I was doing. Then the pain of putting my own shoulder back hit me, and I focused all at once on what needed to be done.
Kill or be killed.
It's an instinct that lives inside all of us.
When it woke in me, it turned me into another woman.
Pulling back, I got leverage on the knife with both hands, freeing Jack's grip on me. I aimed its Williams Sonoma point at his chest and drove it down hard enough to sink in. It hit resistance as it sank between his ribs, so I twisted the knife and slashed sideways, trying to do as much damage as possible.
He made a sound like a dying animal. Which he was, I guess. I remember looking into his eyes—I don't know what I expected. Some part of me wanted to see, wanted to know what it looks like when the soul leaves its body. He went down to the floor, and I followed him, pushing the only blade I had inside his body once more.
I put my weight into the knife handle and drove it home until there was a terrible, strange, spasm from his chest.
But even as his eyelids fluttered closed and he stopped making any noise at all, paranoia gripped me. What if this was another one of his tricks? He'd played the weakling so many times, like a possum lying still in the road to fool you. For all I knew he was about to get back up and slap me around some more.
So I stabbed him again.
This time, I had more of a hang on the technique. I slid the point down his rib cage until I felt the soft give of flesh and pushed the knife in, sharp side down, like sliding through the meat of a roast chicken.
And they say housewives don't have skills that carry outside the kitchen.
My rage, fear, and pain carried me through a few more frenzied stabs. I don't remember all of them, but the police report said seven in total. They made it sound like I was some sort of maniac, stabbing him over and over, but I've seen the movies. The monster always has to be slain twice.
After I'd killed him, I washed the blood off the knife so it would be sanitary for cooking, scrubbed my hands, nails, face, and hair. I didn't know what to do, so I did the first thing I thought of: got a tarp and a saw out, then cut him into pieces, put him in the first large container I could find—our two suitcases for Europe, a honeymoon that would never be, just like the engagement and the wedding—and wheeled him down to the river that flowed behind our apartment building.
It was stupid. I don't know why I did it. I don't even know how—my shoulder hurt so much from being dislocated that it was a miracle I didn't lose the arm. When the cops found me, three days later, they didn't understand how I'd done any of it. They were sure I had to have had a male co-killer who helped me out.
I shouldn't have had the strength inside of me. It was emotion alone that carried me through.
That's something my defense attorney has been claiming at my trial. He says that fear—of my abuser, of the world that wouldn't punish him or protect me—is why I stabbed Jack to death, and why the jury should be lenient on me when they consider my charges.
I don't think it was fear, though.
I think it was rage.
And something else, something murky beneath it all, a bone-deep and ancient feeling that I don't quite understand, but that felt like hunger.
A little part of me wanted to stab him more than seven times.
Chapter 3
Turning to me, my defense attorney says reassuringly, "I'm confident we have the jury on our side. Those photos you took on your iPhone really sealed the deal. And the messages about covering up the bruises in time for your cousin's wedding."
"I just wanted makeup tips."
He nods, shooting me a slightly bewildered look. "If you get out of here alive, my suggestion is therapy. Lots of it."
I can't afford therapy, and he should know that. His bills are being paid by a non-profit that helps victims of domestic abuse accused of crimes related to self-defense. My mom is responsible for getting their attention; her teary-eyed interviews where she talked on and on about how Jack barely let me speak to her drew the nation's attention, especially when she told everyone she's a cancer survivor who didn't get to see me during her rounds of chemotherapy.
Glancing back at her spot in the gallery, I make eye contact with her and my stepdad. She waves, and I want to wave back, but I'm wearing handcuffs connected to a belly chain, courtesy of the judge presiding over my trial. Apparently she didn't want someone who stabbed a man to death to have free use of her hands in the vicinity of her and all these people in the gallery.
I have fans. Dozens of them. Most are crazed—they think I killed Jack in cold blood and want me to get off anyway. A few call me by my nickname, Killer Ellen, which if you ask me is a bit uncreative. It doesn't even rhyme.
The court rustles as the judicial assistant steps forward to announce, "The jury is back from deliberation and will now give their final verdict."
Twelve jurors file in through the back door, the bailiff beside them, each taking a seat in the jury box. I've studied them endlessly over my days in the courtroom, since I had nothing else to do. They've all got nicknames: Shawl Woman, Man Who Picks His Nose When He Thinks No One is Watching, Dude with Crush on Shawl Woman, Big Nose Blue Blazer, stuff like that. Most of them look at me with a mixture of pity and horror, but hopefully after everything my lawyer has shown them, it's mostly pity.
I don't think anyone understands that I'm not just a victim or just a villain. I'm a little bit of both. I'm a killer, and I've felt no remorse for what I've done, shed not a single tear. Jack may have helped nudge me in this direction, but some part of me wonders if I was always destined to become a murderer.
The instant I saw the life leave his eyes, I knew there was part of me that would crave that feeling again, no matter how hard I try to fight it.
The jury doesn't need to know that, though. All they need t
o know is that Jack was a monster, and he did deserve to die.
No matter how handsome and kind he seemed.
Even though I once loved him.
At the end, he was nothing but a beast.
The only question is whether or not the jury will see it that way.
"Jury, please give us your verdict," the judge instructs.
Rising awkwardly, the jury foreman clasps his hands in front of him nervously—I call him Palm Sweat in my mind—and speaks in a rushed voice to no one in particular.
"On the charge of Second Degree Murder, we find the defendant Ellen Arizona, not guilty."
A little cheer goes up in the gallery behind me, but I'm still holding my breath. The judge narrows her eyes at my little fan group and bangs her gavel. "Order, order in the court!" Everyone hushes. "Foreman, please continue."
"On the charge of Voluntary Manslaughter—" His voice cuts off as he coughs into his hand for a few long, tense moments, after which he wipes his damp palm on the front of his shirt, and I wrinkle my nose in disgust. "On the charge of Voluntary Manslaughter, we find the defendant Ellen Arizona," he coughs some more, "guilty."
The whole gallery rises up in a variety of voices. I'm sure I hear a sob of happiness from someone who's probably Jack's mother; I haven't looked in her direction since the trial began.
I feel like my heart has sunk into my stomach and is sloshing around in bile. Just the thought of my sentence—ten years, maybe more—is enough to make me want to vomit. I'll serve out the rest of my twenties in prison and never have a normal life because of this verdict.
But the foreman is looking at the judge, eyes wide, trying to say something. Frowning, she bangs her gavel, and order slowly settles over the courtroom again.
"Sorry," the foreman says, "my hay fever is getting to me. We find the defendant not guilty."
The judge raises her eyebrows. "What was that? Please speak clearly and loudly, so the whole court can hear you. This is a life we're talking about, after all."
"Sorry." Turning towards the courtroom, the foreman clears his throat, and there's a silence so loud you can hear a pin drop, if one did. "On the charge of Voluntary Manslaughter, we find the defendant not guilty."