Cuts Like Glass

by Dana Feldman

  He says nothing. He just waits for me to fill in the blanks.

  “I was also never loved. I never knew security, never felt safe, never knew what a home or a family was really like. I learned to never allow myself to get attached. Not to any person, or home, or school. I became used to my way of life.”

  “And yet from your school records, even with all of the changes in your life, you excelled academically. How were you able to do that?”

  “It was a game that I played. I would pretend that I was special, an angel or a spy sent to explore different people and their lives. Sometimes I was a secret agent. The fantasy changed at different times, but whatever form the game would morph into, it helped.”

  “And you lived this way until you met Gabe?”

  “Yes,” I say, remembering for a brief moment the way that he used to look at me in the very beginning. He melted away any uncertainty with just a glance. He tore down my walls with a smile.

  “What was different with him?”

  “I fell in love,” I admit, wondering why he’s so interested in Gabe. He always has been. Since day one, he’s single-handedly asked me more questions about my husband than anyone else ever has. He seems more curious about Gabe than about any other facet of my life. This has always irked me and made me wonder why the fascination? Most therapists focus on your past, your childhood. Bryer’s interests remain fixed on my marriage. I find it very odd and questionable.

  “It must have been devastating for you when things began to fall apart,” he states, though it’s really a question.

  “Yes, the first time Gabe got angry with me, well, it was earth-shattering. I remember the day,” I begin. “He was so angry because he thought that I was flirting with Chris. I kept explaining that he was just a friend and nothing more. He insisted that I was lying. He called me a fucking whore. I was devastated.”

  “Did he hit you then?”

  “No, not that time.”

  “When was the first time that he hit you?”

  I look at the hourglass and figure by the amount of sand that’s left, that I have less than five minutes to go. I can do this, I think to myself. I can’t tell him about the first time; it’s too painful. I remember crawling on the floor to get away.

  “He came home late one night from work. I was already asleep, and he tried to wake me. I was so tired, and I remember just feeling exhausted. He shook me awake, and he was screaming obscenities at me. The words he used when he spoke to me…”

  He doesn’t say anything as I wipe away a tear. I’m staring out the window, watching a bird add some sticks to the nest he’s building in the tree outside.

  “Well, I think that you can guess a few of them. Unkind would be an understatement. He accused me of sleeping with other men and refusing to have sex with him. It was an ugly argument. I remember seeing, from just the corner of my eye, his arm and hand rise behind him. And then I felt the punch, right in my gut. I couldn’t breathe. I was coughing, choking, and I vomited on the bed. He said that was in case I’d gotten pregnant by another man. His idea of an abortion.”

  “And were there ever any other men?” he asks, and I’m quite shocked that this is the question that he’s chosen to ask after what I’ve just told him. It’s something Gabe would ask at a time like this.

  “No, never,” I answer truthfully.

  The sand is thankfully almost fully drained, just a few more minutes.

  “Now, Dr. Bryer, you need to explain to me how my childhood factors into this. How has forcing me to speak about that part of my life helped you to explain the actions of my husband?”

  “It’s not his actions that I’m trying to explain. It’s yours. Why would you stay with a man that you say was cruel to you?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “I think it’s because you were never taught appropriate boundaries. Why do you think?”

  “Because he said that he’d kill me if I ever left him,” I reply, just as the last of the sand drains through, emptying the bulb. He begins to ask me another question, but I gesture to the figurine, and he stops himself.

  We spend the rest of the session talking about the past few days. We do briefly discuss Peter, but I leave out the fact that he already knew who I was before I ever had the chance to tell him. It’s simply too much to get into, and after what I just went through, I don’t have it in me.

  I’m careful in the way that I answer the rest of his questions. I’ve learned what satiates his appetite for knowledge into the darkest parts of my mind and life. I know that he wants to help me. At least this is what I keep telling myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  BEFORE YOU GO LOOKING

  The phone rings several times before I even realize it. I’m in my car driving home after my session with Dr. Bryer. My mind is a million miles away. It’s Evelyn.

  “Hey,” I answer.

  “Hi, can you talk?”

  “Yes, what’s going on?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes,” I reply. I decide it’s best to pull over. I park under the shade of a tree in a residential area. I need to focus completely on what she’s about to tell me.

  “Ok. I’ve just pulled over so you have my full attention.”

  “I was able to confirm a few more things. Gabe’s days as an intelligence officer with the government date back to 1983. He might have been doing this sort of work prior, but this is the earliest we could dig up. His role in the agency was to take on assignments from entities very high up in the political world: judges, congressmen; that sort, the type that didn’t like to wipe their own ass. Basically, if they were powerful degenerates with a lot of money, he’s worked for them.”

  “What kind of work exactly?”

  “He cleaned up messes. This included murdering a lot of people. Many were simply collateral damage; for instance, the Superior Court Judge having an affair with his clerk that was being blackmailed or a congressman sleeping with his male aide. You get the picture. And one more thing,” she says.

  I brace myself.

  “Gabe runs his own agency now.”

  “I figured out rather quickly, maybe a year or so into the marriage, that there was a side of Gabe’s life that I wasn’t privy to. But that first year when I was so newly in love, I explained away his behavior as stress over work. I didn’t really want to look at things as they actually were. I wanted to live in my fantasy. And I was able to do just that, for a while, at least. But then as things got increasingly worse and his outbursts more regular and frequent, I had to face my reality. And I knew that I was in trouble.”

  “What were some of the behaviors?”

  “He was moody, impulsive, aggressive. All of this was verbal, at first. And then,” I stop myself, carefully continuing, wanting to get every detail right. “But then his behavior escalated into violence. The angry outbursts were followed by physical abuse. I wanted to get out, to be free, but he’d made it extremely clear that no one leaves him. I often wondered if there were other women out there that he’d hurt. I fantasized about one of them finding me, and helping me to escape just as she had. But no one ever came to help me and I knew what that meant.”

  “I know how hard this is for you, but you’re very brave. I’m concerned in regards to your situation with Peter. I don’t like this. Gabe is the jealous type, and if he finds out…”

  “I have to tell you something, Evelyn, about Peter.”

  “Ok, you can tell me anything.”

  “He knows that I was married to his father, and that he’s missing.”

  “Does he know anything about Gabe’s line of work?”

  “No. I obviously didn’t bring any of that up, but I let him talk, and he told me that he found out about his father on the Internet. We both know that Gabe had covered his tracks quite well, and no one could’ve found anything on him prior to 2009. But Bob had explained to me that Peter had a high security clearance in the military because he’d been working on a few top secret, high prior
ity projects. I believe that at one point, he looked his father up. That must be when he found out about me. I just don’t know what he knows about him prior to 2009, if he’d been able to dig up any previous aliases. Do you know what name he was using at the time that he killed Peggy?”

  “Gregg Martin. There were several other aliases.”

  “Have you been able to find out his birth name?”

  “Gregory Michael Anderson. He’s had at least a half-dozen aliases and variations on these names since.”

  “I don’t know how much of this Peter knows.”

  “How long has he known about you?”

  “For a while now. Since before he came to stay with me, anyway.”

  “When did you find this out?”

  “The other night. I swear that I had no idea before then.”

  “I think that it’s time for the three of us to talk. I need to try and gauge how much he knows. What do you think?”

  “I agree. Can you come over tonight?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I’ll be there at eight.”

  I’m not sure exactly how long I’ve been sitting here in my car, under this tree. I know that it was light out when I first stopped here, and I know that the sun is now going down behind the houses just across the street from me.

  I can’t move. I can’t think. I can’t speak. I’m so tempted now, as I have been in the past, to pack my things and just disappear. How wonderful it would be to start over anew. But I can’t leave Evelyn or Peter.

  Evelyn has worked too hard to help free me from Gabe, and Peter, well he’s an altogether different story. I don’t want to walk away from him. I can’t even begin to explain my feelings for him, but I’m not ready to leave him behind.

  I also realize that I can’t leave things unfinished with Gabe. If I leave now, I’ll always have to look over my shoulder. My life will never be my own. I’ll always be exactly where he wants me to be, in a state of constant fear of him. I cannot allow him to have that power over me. He’s had it for too long already.

  I’d just reiterated my fears to Evelyn about Gabe trying to frame me for his murder. She believes me now. She understands the gravity of the situation. And she has a plan. I trust her. I finally know that I have a true friend in her. She won’t let me down, this I know for certain.

  The first time that we met she’d warned me to stop making trouble for myself. “Before you go looking for problems, you’d better be ready to find a few.”

  I’d been stirring up quite a bit of controversy insisting that my husband was still alive. No one had believed me then. But I knew that no matter what she said, that she had a feeling in her gut that I was right.

  That was when she’d gone rogue in her investigation. She left no stone unturned. I’ll never forget the day that she called me, asking if I could meet with her.

  “Let’s keep all of this between us,” she’d said. I’d been so alone, so afraid. I hadn’t even realized just how isolated I’d become. Gabe had inserted himself into my world, and he stood between me and everyone else in it.

  That day after our meeting, I remembered feeling something that I’d never felt before. It was like I was a part of a team. Evelyn was going to help me. Finally, someone was going to be on my side.

  That was the day that I figured out several things. I knew that Gabe himself had put the vast amount of blood that was found on the boat there. I knew that he’d set me up. Flashes of memories had started to emerge and I had started to put the pieces together. I remember lying there on the cold floor of the boat, watching him as he collected vials of his blood from a duffle bag. I remember hearing the zipper open, and I watched as he pulled a small cooler from the bag. I saw him as he opened each vial and poured the blood all over the boat.

  I tried to speak, but I wasn’t able. I kept going in and out of consciousness as he set up his escape and my demise. There was that brilliance of his, one of the many things about him that made me fall in love with him. I felt so helpless, so defeated. I wondered how long he had been planning all of this. How had I missed the signs? As much as I wanted to die in those moments, I knew that I couldn’t allow myself to give up. That was what he’d counted on, me quitting. I knew that I had to survive.

  That was also the same day that Evelyn told me that Gabe had been reading all my emails and listening to my voicemails. She’d gotten a hold of his laptop, which he’d unsuccessfully tried to destroy, and cell phone records, which she was able to show me.

  He’d been following me online, as well as in person, for the better part of a year at that point. I knew what all of this meant. He knew that I was planning to leave him, one way or another. And there was no way in hell that he was going to let that happen.

  There was a moment when it hit me, clear as day. He and I had both been planning the same thing. The next time that he attacked me, I had a plan to kill him, and he had a plan to kill me. He just plotted out his plan much more thoroughly than I did mine.

  Always a step ahead of me, he’d won. I had no idea when I first met him, when I praised his intelligence and loved him for his cleverness, that he’d one day use the very things about him that I fell in love with, to try to destroy me.

  It’s only now that I fully understand his motives. In his mind I had a real shot at getting away from him. I saw through him like no one else ever had.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  TWO SNAKES

  “It won’t work,” Peter says. Evelyn begins to argue with him but then realizes that he might know more than he’s saying. We’re being careful with what we say, leaving out any details of Gabe’s work. Evelyn is testing Peter, trying to figure out how much he knows about his father. His ambivalence is a clue that he knows more than he’s letting on. I’m still not sure if Peter thinks that his father is alive, or if he’s convinced he’s dead.

  “You’re a trained Marine,” she says, pushing her agenda. “You had a very high security clearance for a Marine.”

  “Yes, and your point?”

  “Why was your clearance so high?”

  “I was involved with a particular mission, one I cannot discuss.”

  “So you’re used to dealing with individuals like this then?” she asks, pushing him.

  “Yes, but I really don’t know who I’m dealing with here. You have to at least have an idea who your enemy is if you’re going to go to war,” he defends.

  “Then we need to find out whom we’re dealing with,” she says determined.

  “If it were that simple, it’d be done,” he argues, willing her to see his point-of-view.

  “We need help,” I interject. “I can call that detective back, Bob Brown. Maybe he can help us.”

  “I don’t think we should involve anyone else,” Evelyn says. “It just isn’t smart.”

  “I agree,” I concur, seeing her point. “Look, we’ll never be able to find him without a solid plan. If he’s still alive, that is. We need to really think this through.”

  “You’re right, we need to think logically,” Peter interjects. “We need to be one step ahead of him.”

  “He has the upper hand. We have no idea where he is or when he’ll resurface. We need to find a way to lure him out of hiding. I know Gabe, and he’s somewhere close by. He knows everything that I’m doing. I know that he’s watching me. Us. He either wants me to go down for his murder, or he wants to kill me. And now the two of you are involved.”

  “Don’t worry about any of that. I need you to focus,” Evelyn tells me. “If you’re right and Gabe is watching you, following your every move, then we need to use this to our advantage.”

  When I ask her to explain what she means, she tells me that she will, but that she first needs to get back to the station and set up an undercover unit.

  “It won’t just be his eyes on you,” she’d told me before leaving. She assured me not to be concerned with her safety, that this is her job. Peter had said the same; that he’d been in far worse danger overseas. None of this makes me feel a
ny better or any less responsible.

  “A drink?” Peter asks, just after she leaves. I nod my head as I sink myself low into the sofa cushions.

  He brings me an ice-cold vodka martini just the way I like it, dirty with three olives. He makes himself one as well, with gin. And then he puts wood in the fireplace and starts a fire.

  The moment he sits down beside me on the sofa I know what can happen tonight if I let it. I look at the sliding glass patio doors. The blinds are tightly drawn shut. No one can see in here. We are alone. The outside world has no place in here right now. He’s sitting opposite me on the sofa, his back leaning against the other arm, our feet close, but not touching.

  I know that moments like this can change into something altogether different in just an instant. A stare that lasts just a few seconds too long, or as in this case right now, a foot as it grazes another. Just the feeling of his skin barely touching mine sends a shockwave of heat through my entire body.

  All the feelings that I’ve had have just bubbled up to the surface, before I abruptly brush them away. They return quickly, stronger than ever. I don’t look up at first, I can’t. The weight of his stare will do me in. I’ll have no defenses with which to fight him off.

  And then I feel myself respond to his touch, my foot entwined with his. I look up and there it is. That stare, the one that goes right into and through me. He pulls me towards him, and I’m sitting on top of him, eye to eye. My fingers are in his hair, his hands on either side of my face. We stare at one another for a few seconds like this.

  At first when he kisses me it’s gentle, soft. I can feel as his lips gently brush up against mine. With each passing second the kisses become more and more passionate and then frantic as I open my mouth and our tongues explore. His hands run the course of my body sending shockwaves through me. My body takes over my brain now. Suddenly we’re on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table.

  We cannot seem to get our clothes off fast enough. I just need to feel his skin on mine. Now. But then it’s as if I suddenly wake up out of this trance and push him away, off me. I quickly scoot backwards away from him. He sits there shocked, not moving, just watching me.