by Kate Stewart
Two years into our marriage she injured her back after she got sloppy drunk and claimed I dropped her while we were having sex on Max’s boat. The truth was she’d lost all mobility by the time she got to me half naked and I wasn’t sober or alert enough to catch her when she flew at me. I shouldered the blame, giving her an out to shield her from embarrassment. We’d even made a joke about it in the hospital, while she waited connected to a morphine drip before she got the news the surgery was inevitable.
She’d blamed me ever since for the agony she endured afterward. In a year of unimaginable hell, I helped her through it all, the surgery, the pain she dealt with daily and the rehab, but the rehab she truly needed never came.
Kat barely let me touch her after the ‘accident’, surgery and recovery. And once her anger surfaced, it was over for us. She’d taken to pills to numb herself and I’d tried to be there until self-preservation kicked in.
The therapist I kept appointments with—that Kat never bothered to show for—said she was in a mental state of paralysis. That her mind couldn’t accept her body’s limitations, so she abused the pills to make herself feel capable again without the pain. Months after her surgery, Kat gave up on her life-long dream of mentoring other gymnasts due to those limitations. She turned up her nose at my every solution.
And still she blamed me, and I let her, but nothing helped. Her misplaced anger only grew, and my resentment began.
All she saw when she looked at me was someone to guilt and all I saw when I looked at her was a woman who had to get off on narcotics to function. And the scary part was that she was functioning, picture perfect to anyone who didn’t get close enough to see the cracks. But those cracks only got magnified by her wrath and I was the chosen one on the receiving end of it all.
I was finished pretending that our marriage hadn’t ended the first time she took one of those pills to get high and escape the reality of her life with me. I was done pretending I wanted things to stay the same, to sink into her pit of despair with her and stop living. I selfishly let myself live while she drowned, hoping I could do it for both of us. But I was empty. So utterly empty.
Three years into my marriage I realized my wife was a spoiled, entitled, wreck of a woman who needed things fixed by everyone else, to feel safe. I couldn’t fix her, so she broke me first with her words and then with her fists.
And Abbie . . . Abbie was much-needed evidence life was still worth living. I wanted to tell her about Kat before we got physical, but I got caught up in our whirlwind and I never wanted out. Being with Abbie gave me clarity. I brought nothing of my life with Kat into the new relationship, and it wasn’t in vain.
I discovered more of who I was without the battle scars of my marriage blurring my vision. And I felt better, though I could never deny my life before Abbie, and I had every intention of sharing that part of it with her. But without that burden of truth, I felt free to be the man I wanted to be with her, where I’d been paralyzed for years with Kat.
I’d already separated myself from my wife in every way. Kat’s denial was toxic, so much so that my final attempt at finishing what I started when I left her backfired into a loss I would never recover from.
I lost Abbie.
Goddammit!
Kat imploded in the seat beside me as I stopped her again from retrieving the bottle from the back seat.
“Can you,” I muttered as I wiped some blood from the fresh cut on my lip and studied the dark purple polka dot next to my eye in the rearview—no doubt a result of the connection from her wedding ring, “for one fucking minute, talk to me like an adult. I’ve been good to you, Kat, even when I shouldn’t have. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“I hate you,” she screamed as she did her best to get a rise out of me.
Defeated, I stayed mute until I pulled over to the shell of the home we used to share before she jumped out. I whispered the truth under my breath. “I hate you too.”
I dialed her father’s number as she ranted and smashed her palms against the passenger window. “Unlock the fucking car!”
It was no use. If I didn’t give the pills to her she would be roaming some shady neighborhood to get a fix in a matter of minutes. Kat slammed the car door after retrieving her bottle and made a beeline for the house.
When she opened the door, she would see the petition for divorce on the counter. I had no doubt the divorce papers would be looked over the way they had been for months. She would take a few pills and make herself busy until she took two Xanax downing them with a glass of blanc to pass out. In the morning, she would take two more pills before her feet hit the floor, and two more with her ten o’clock cup of coffee.
With Kat safely inside, I got out of the car as her father answered. “Cameron?”
“Billy.”
“You ended it,” he said with a sigh.
“It’s been over. I don’t know what she’s told you, but I left her a year ago. I can’t do this anymore. I won’t do this anymore. She’s an addict. She needs your help. And I think tonight is going to be bad.”
“Can you just sit tight until—”
“Listen to me,” I yelled. “I’m done. I’ve bled enough over this shit, Billy. I’m done chasing her around the streets. I’m not taking her phone calls anymore. I’m done. If you give a damn about your daughter at all, get her help. Get her clean.”
“I’m sorry, Cameron. I’m leaving the office now.”
Walking over to the mailbox I tossed Kat’s keys inside before I hopped into my SUV. My plan had been simple. Pick her up without any way of escape and make her face reality. But my plans were as delusional as Kat remained. Tomorrow she would call me without giving it a second thought. It wasn’t that phone call I was afraid of avoiding. It was the one I would avoid that could save her life.
I coughed out my emotion as four years of my life was laid to rest and guilty tears soaked my face, for Kat, for Abbie and for the abomination that had become my life, my marriage, and my new quest for happiness.
Every light on the house went on as Kat moved around in another pill-induced rage. I could hear her screaming at me from inside of the house, daring me to set foot inside.
I wiped the clotted blood from my lip and held it in front of me before I glanced back at the house remembering the day we moved in. So much had changed, except for the number outside of the mailbox on the porch.
The first few years of our marriage that number meant life and the rest of mine. The number was now the bane of my existence. It mocked me and told me I was a fool though a certain level of relief passed over me when I knew I would never have to see it again.
No matter what happened to Kat from that moment on, I wouldn’t be there to witness it. I couldn’t.
And I had to let the fear go and I tried my best as I drove away.
I thought I’d hit rock bottom the first time Kat hit me. I was wrong.
Shivering in my jacket, I watched her approach. She stopped when she spotted me from her gate.
“Abbie,” I said, moving to stand on her porch, my breath blowing in visible clouds of regret in front of me. It was well after midnight, and I hated that I was itching to find out where she’d been. I hated the hypocrite I was, but with her, I couldn’t rationalize anything I felt.
It seemed such a surreal predicament. I’d never felt so out of control in loving someone. I was terrified, and when I confessed as much, and she confirmed I wasn’t alone, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever felt. At that moment, I felt cursed, like I’d lost every right to know anything at all about her.
It was enough to make me lunge for her, to grasp onto her, and beg her for any breath she gave me. In the memory of that feeling, a split second, I went from a man with an apology to a man begging for his ability to breathe. She did that to me. I had to make her understand I would suffocate without her. That I’d been breathing all wrong before we’d met.
I wiped my eyes of the emotion that threatened as she attempted to push pa
st me, and I gently gripped her shoulders and forced her to face me. The skin of her cheeks was splotched red, and tear soaked.
“Abbie, please. I was going to tell you everything tonight. I tried. I swear to God, I just needed to be with you first. Fuck, this is coming out all wrong.”
I swallowed hard, praying the right words would come. Tears clouded her vision and she did nothing to hide her hurt. Every hitched breath, every anguished cry seeped into my chest. I was ruined by her evident pain. So fucking ruined. And I had no way of getting through to her without permission she would never give. No amount of begging would do it, but I pressed on anyway with the glimmer of hope that was us. Everything we’d built. Everything we knew about the other.
“Please.”
The look in her eye leveled me as her hurt morphed into anger and my fear set in.
“There’s nothing you can say,” she cried. “Nothing.”
Her voice was raw when she spoke, inches away but it might as well have been a universe. “Leave and don’t come back. I don’t ever want to hear from you again. Please respect that. Please just leave me alone.”
“Just let me talk to you. Let me explain.”
“Whatever excuse you have, no matter what it is will never be good enough. It’s over. It’s so over.” She choked on her words as my chest sank with the weight of them.
“That’s not us, Abbie. We don’t deal in absolutes. That’s not what we’re about.”
Her lips parted, her eyes incredulous. “Was that always going to be your excuse? This is different, and you know it.”
“It’s not.” If I had any chance of getting through to her, I had to remind her of us. “This is exactly what it’s about. I need you to forget every conclusion you’ve drawn for one second and remember why we started this. Everything about what’s happening right now is then. I left her and filed for divorce eight months before I met you. It’s only been prolonged due to her mental health. Abbie, she’s a drug addict and a liar. I know that sounds like a cop-out but it’s the truth. And I can almost guarantee anything she may have told you about me is a lie. I made a huge mistake by not telling you sooner, but I swear to God it’s over between us. It has been over for years. Kat refused to acknowledge it, and that’s why I picked her up tonight. I wanted our divorce final. So we, you and me, could be free to be what we are. For our future. That’s the only reason. Please believe me. I’m not that kind of man, and you don’t believe it, or you don’t want to. I know you don’t want to believe it. I can prove every word I’m saying is true. I can take those doubts away from you. I can make you believe me, believe in me again.”
I didn’t know if it was the truth, and I hated myself for telling her things that may border on more lies, but I wanted to believe it because she made me believe. Her love made me feel like a king, a god, even if I was the Judas of our story.
I stared into her bloodshot eyes. She loved me, without a doubt, but it was the pain in them that I feared. I knew what it was capable of. It was always the pain that twisted love into a tragedy. Expectations ruined the rest.
“The phone calls,” she said in realization, “this morning, that was her?” Without admission, she jerked away from me, the look in her eyes eating away at me by the second. It was too familiar to me and foreign with her.
She was tearing me apart piece by piece with her anger and it could only destroy us. I knew all too well. I’d lived it.
“I was trying to give you what you wanted. You didn’t want to know.” She couldn’t hear me, she couldn’t hear a single word I was saying. I’d never felt so helpless. Even after all I’d been through with Kat.
“I don’t know you,” she whispered between us. “I don’t know you.”
“That’s not true, you know that’s not true.”
“Of all the questions I should have asked,” she said faintly as a tear trickled down her cheek, the light from her porch highlighting the sight of it as it sliced my chest. “The question I should have asked . . .” she said with a humorless laugh. Her eyes seared into mine, icy blue steel. “Tell me you’re not married, Cameron. Please tell me you’re not married.”
“Abbie, I wanted to tell you, I tried to tell you.”
“You hid behind our arrangement. It’s the same damn thing as lying, and you lied to me this morning! You lied to me and you told me you loved me!”
I swallowed hard, my back pressed against the rock that was my heart and the hard place I’d forced myself into.
“Tell me you’re not married, Cameron.”
“I’m married.” I only let that truth rest a half a second. “Separated—”
It was the sting of her hand and the sound of it connecting that distorted everything. The feel of it altered every intention I had by showing up at her door. The defiant look on her face and challenge in her eyes brought forth some part of me I didn’t identify with and took over at that moment. The shock filtered and remained the only thing I focused on until the anger set in.
The pieces of myself I was most proud of slipped out of my reach as I splintered.
And then I snapped.
“Don’t you ever lay a goddamned hand on me in anger ever again! Keep your fucking hands to yourself, do you hear me!?” I caught her retreating hand by the wrist. “Never again!”
Abbie shrieked in surprise and cowered in fear as she watched me stand to my full height while I seethed with outrage. The pain that radiated from her palm streamlined to the inner workings of my chest, seeped and dripped like acid burning a hole straight through me.
I felt like the monster her eyes accused me of being. Anger blistered me from all sides as my love for her spilled over my face and the incredulity at what she’d just done. Salt dripped into the cut in my lip as my wrath came out, along with years of unchecked anger.
She stammered out an apology. “C-Cameron, I shouldn’t have done that,” she said as she looked up at me as if I were a stranger.
I shut my eyes tightly as she whimpered in fear. When I opened them, I was no more. Fist clenched at my sides, I lashed out. “Fuck it, fuck it! To hell with you! Believe whatever the fuck you want to believe about me. I’ve done nothing but love you since the minute I fucking met you!”
I stormed off, my eyes cloudy and my heart erased as she sobbed out my name behind me to . . . what . . . stop me? I would never know because I sealed the door on us the rest of the way, for her, for us both. I thought I was done with being miserable, but with one strike of her hand, I was done with it all.
Staring out the window I could pinpoint the street where she slept. The address where I’d made some of the best memories of my life. It was only fitting that I watched from afar. I welcomed the pitch black I stood in while I sipped the bottle and the burn crept in with the warmth that covered me.
But it was a false substitution.
I didn’t care. I wanted to be free of the gnawing in my chest.
I had four months of something bordering the perfection I swore didn’t exist with a woman who fit me. She was the epitome of everything I’d ever craved. And just as easily as she came in and stole the biggest part of me, she took it with her. All I wanted when I met her was a little bit of peace. I still wanted it, but I only seemed to find it with her.
With things as they were, I knew peace was lost. And my soul wasn’t going to rest without her. I’d never been so exhausted in my life. She’d unknowingly pushed me past what I was capable of. I had nothing left, where I had so much inside before. For her. Because she brought me back from the brink and made love beautiful and simple. And I jumped at the chance at something so pure with her.
Maybe we were better off as strangers. She should hate me. I was guilty in an unrepairable way. I hated so much of what I saw in my reflection off the glass I stared through. I could still feel the sting of her hand, but it wasn’t my face that ached.
On Christmas morning I woke up in her arms, her fingers on the back of my neck, her healing touch my new addiction, her smile erasing the
days I spent without her. The last few years of my life bearable by the minutes with her.
Why were the best fucking things in life always so short lived? Good one minute, and then stripped away in a blink. It always seemed the case, especially when it came to the women in my life.
My mother’s friendship and sudden absence, the truth of who my wife was, and the loss of the woman I was meant to love had the same type of effect. A common bond they all shared to let me know I wasn’t ever in control.
All I did was fight for the happiness I wanted to deserve. When the fuck was it going to be my time? And hadn’t I given enough flesh? I could have sworn I paid for my sins, apparently, I hadn’t shed enough. But life could take it all if I could have her back. The irony was, there was no deal to be made, no one to barter with and I knew the why.
This time, I did it to myself.
“Fuck you,” I muttered to the bastard that watched me swig the bottle. Posing was how I kept it together. It was in my posture, the way I dressed, the way I pretended not to care, not to need, when it was all I’d ever done. I was just as much of a hypocrite as my wife. She was the queen of liars, and I her loyal subject. No matter how much of her I’d thought I’d shaken off in the last year, she had mutated me to the point of keeping up appearances.
When my mom died, I kept busy, using small talk to tune out the pain. I did the same thing when Kat and I started having problems. It was easier to cope when you were busy asking questions about someone else’s life. A way to escape your own. I had a constant need to connect. Abbie had that same need. Nothing alike but hearts in common.
‘Sticks and stones’ was never my motto. The phrase had never been a part of my vocabulary. It meant nothing to me growing up. I’d never dealt with the kind of things I’d had to in the past few years with Kat. I was the golden boy, the poster child. I resembled a carefree man most of my life. I had no issue getting the vote, the friends, or the women.
But I only excelled because I worked hard for it, sometimes twice as hard. And I rewarded those who pushed me by pushing back and doing better. I made few enemies and I was never afraid of shadows because I cast my own.