Chapter 4
That night I didn't sleep. I'd slept badly all those last months — lying awake, listening into the dark, waiting for the sound of the key in the lock. He'd started coming back later and later, and I still waited, as if that waiting still meant something.
The key turned around three in the morning. But not quietly, as usual — with a clatter, with a stranger's laughter, with voices. He hadn't come back alone.
I sat up in bed. From the entryway came the ring of dropped keys, whispering, a stifled giggling — a woman's. Then his voice, drunk, loud, not troubling to hide:
— Quiet, you. You'll wake the wife.
And more laughter — as if it were the funniest joke in the world.
I came out into the hallway in my nightgown, barefoot, and stopped. Mark stood by the wall, holding on to it, drunk enough that he pronounced his words with exaggerated precision. And beside him, clinging to his elbow, swaying, was she.
Ella.
The very one. From the back office, from that cursed corporate party. How many there'd been since, I'd long lost count. I recognized her at once — by that light, ringing confidence of a person who has never truly been betrayed.
— Oh, and here's the lady of the house, — she drawled, looking me over head to foot, and swayed. — Mark, you never said she was so… domestic.
— What is she doing here? — My voice trembled. — Mark. What is she doing in our home. At night.
He peeled himself off the wall, stepped toward me, and said quietly, looking me straight in the eye:
— Don't start.
— You're drunk.
— And you're a bore. — He smirked. — Go to sleep, Ariana. Or don't sleep. Suit yourself.
Ella unstuck herself from the wall and, swaying, moved down the corridor — confidently, as if she'd been here more than once. At the bedroom door she turned around.
— Cute little place. — She swept a hand around the walls. — Only you should change the curtains, too heavy. And that wedding photo… — She nodded somewhere into the depths of the bedroom and giggled. — Romantic. Mark, you might take it down.
— We'll change them. And I'll take it down, — he said, not looking at me.
"We'll change them." "I'll take it down." One short word — and everything inside me caved in. He was talking about my home as if it were his and hers. He was already living in it with her — in his thoughts, in his plans, in that careless "we'll change them."
— Maybe make her a bed in the kitchen? — Ella glanced at me over her shoulder, tilting her head, studying me the way you study one object too many in a room. — Since she's here anyway… with the furnishings.
— That's enough, — I said. My voice had gone hoarse, but I still blocked his way to the bedroom. — Mark. You're drunk, she's drunk. Take her away. Call a taxi. Please.
— "Please," — he mimicked, and took me by the chin, tilting my face up to his. He reeked of drink and of her perfume. — You know what I always liked about you? You're forever "please." Never "get out." Another woman would've thrown my things off the balcony ages ago. But you — "please." Convenient.
— Take. Her. Away.
Something in my voice got to him for a second — he narrowed his eyes as if not recognizing me. Then his face smoothed back into a lazy, vicious smirk.
— No. She's staying. — He let go of my chin as if flinging it away. — And you… — His fingers closed on my wrist, hard. — You come with me. Since you love seeing everything with your own eyes so much.
I dug in, wrenched away — useless. He dragged me toward the bedroom, my feet sliding on the floor, and my chest was pounding so hard it drowned out both his footsteps and her laughter behind me.
The door was ajar. He shoved me inside — not roughly, but so that I couldn't brace myself — and I found myself in the middle of our bedroom. The very one, where over the bed hung our wedding photograph. He hadn't even taken it down.
Ella had already settled on the bed — on my side, on top of the coverlet I'd smoothed that morning. From the calm, proprietary way she lay there, I understood: she wasn't here for the first time. In my bed. During my absences. Maybe dozens of times.
— Mark, don't, — I whispered. — Please, not in front of me. Anything, just not in front of me.
— Precisely in front of you. — He shut the door behind our backs, cutting off the way out. His voice was quiet and sober, despite all the whiskey, and that sobriety made it truly terrifying. — Now watch.
— Mark…
— Watch, I said. — He turned me to face the bed, stood behind me, laid his heavy hands on my shoulders so I couldn't turn away. — It turns me on. I want you to remember what a woman who's wanted looks like. Maybe you'll learn something.
He stepped toward Ella and tore the dress off her — sharply, viciously, the way you rip off wrapping. She laughed a drunk, satisfied laugh.
I won't describe what came next. I barely saw it myself.
Everything swam before my eyes, a ringing rose in my ears — dull, mounting, like before a faint. Nausea climbed my throat. The whole world narrowed to a single point: the pattern on the wallpaper right in front of me, which I fixed my eyes on so I wouldn't see the bed, so I'd stay on my feet.
His fingers dug into my shoulders, turning me back every time I tried to look away.
— Don't turn away. Or are you afraid to see what you don't have anymore?
I squeezed my eyes shut — like a child who believes that if you close your eyes, the terrible thing will disappear. It didn't disappear. It sounded — in her laugh, his breathing, the creak of the bed I'd slept in for seven years.
And then the hands on my shoulders loosened — he forgot about me, he no longer had time for a spectator. And in that instant I bolted.
Tore free, burst out the door, raced down the dark corridor, not making out the way. Behind me something slammed — the door, or something inside me, I couldn't tell anymore.
The bathroom. I locked myself in, threw the bolt, and slid down the cold tile to the floor.
The silence here was thick, cottony. Only water dripped from the tap — steady, indifferent, counting off the seconds of my life, which was all, to the last drop, draining away into that crack.
I hugged my knees and sat rocking, the way you rock from a pain you can neither cry out nor scream out. Behind the wall was my husband. And a woman in my bed. And I — here, on the floor, in my own bathroom, where I'd fled like a cornered animal into its burrow.
I lifted my eyes to my reflection in the cabinet door — blurred, foreign.
Thirty years old. Seven of them — right here, on this floor, at a locked door.
I didn't remember that other Ariana. The one who laughed, dreamed, wanted something.
He had erased her — not all at once, but line by line, drop by drop, until all that was left of her was this: a lump on the tile that had even forgotten how to cry.
And then I wanted it all to simply end.
Not to live out of spite, not to fight — I was too tired of fighting.
Just for it to stop hurting. For it to go quiet — completely, forever.
The thought came not like thunder but like relief: warm, deceptively gentle, as if someone had draped a blanket over my shoulders.
My hand reached on its own toward the cabinet door — toward what stood behind it.
My fingers settled on the cold handle. And froze.
Because in that cottony silence, suddenly, very clearly, very soberly, a stranger's voice sounded inside me — his voice: "You'll forgive me again. You always forgive. Of all of you, the most pathetic one is you."
He was certain. Certain I'd break. That sooner or later I'd free up the space for him myself, with my own hands — quietly, cleanly, without a scene. That behind that door he was waiting for exactly this: to discover in the morning that the problem had solved itself.
And that was when — through the ringing, through the nausea, through that warm deceptive numbness — something entirely different rose up in me.
Not despair. Rage.
Hot, living, animal. It spread through my veins like boiling water, burning away the tender emptiness that a minute ago had been pulling me under. I jerked my hand back from the door as if it had scorched me — and gripped the shelf instead.
"No," I said aloud. Quietly, hoarsely, but aloud. — "No. You won't get that."
And then it broke out of me. I swept everything off the shelf — his bottles, his lotions, his expensive cologne — and they flew onto the tile, spraying glass.
I grabbed the cup for the toothbrushes and hurled it at the wall.
Then everything that came to hand. I wanted everything around me to become as shattered as I was inside.
The mirror I struck with my palm, flat, with all my strength. It cracked into a web, and the woman in it scattered into a dozen crooked shards — into a dozen strange, unfamiliar faces.
And I screamed. For the first time in seven years — not into my fist, not into a pillow, not through clenched teeth.
At full voice, so that it was surely heard behind the wall where they lay.
I didn't care. I screamed until I tore my throat raw, until I sank to the floor again — spent, empty, but alive.
And when the scream was done, in the ringing silence one clear, cold thought remained. Not "how do I get him back." Not "how am I worse than them." A different one, terrifying in its simplicity: to make it so that in the end it's him left on the shards. Not me.
I picked up a large piece of the mirror and looked into it — at half a face with ragged breathing and running mascara. But the eyes that looked back were different. Alive. Furious. Mine.
— You'll get out, — I told that half-face. — And take your life back. And leave him nothing but the shards.
Behind the wall everything went quiet. I came out of the bathroom when the sky beyond the black windows was beginning to turn gray.
Ella was asleep on our bed. Mark — beside her, sprawled out, with that same serene face of a man without a conscience.
I didn't wake them. I didn't make a scene, didn't howl, didn't collapse into hysterics — for the first time in seven years.
I just stood in the doorway and looked at them — soberly, calmly, as if seeing it all for the first time as it truly was, without the rose-colored veil I'd stretched over myself for years.
Then I went to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and sat down at the table.
And instead of the usual "how do I get him back," "what did I do wrong," "how am I worse than them," other questions sounded in my head for the first time in a long while.
Dry, businesslike. Whose name the apartment was in — and whether my name was on anything at all.
What was left of that former Ariana besides a maiden name, a degree, a profession, old connections.
How much I'd need to leave not into an abyss, but onto my own feet.
I picked up the phone and, while my husband slept behind the wall with his mistress, quietly, with just my fingers, typed to Dana — not "come get me," not "I feel awful," but two words:
"I need a job."
She answered almost at once, as if she hadn't been sleeping:
"Finally. We'll sort it all out in the morning. Love you."
I set the phone down and looked out the window, where over the rooftops a gray, ugly, but real morning was rising.
He thought that tonight he'd finished me off. He was wrong. Tonight he woke me up.
And that was his first real mistake in seven years.