Chapter 7 #2
— Normal? — I set the glass on the mantel, carefully, so as not to betray the tremor in my hands.
— Mark, we haven't had a family for a long time.
There's you, your women, your father raising our son, and me — furniture you either stand in a corner or cart off to the country under lock and key.
That's not a family. That's a warehouse.
And I no longer want to be a thing in your warehouse.
He stepped toward me — quick, vicious, and I flinched back into the mantel despite myself. But he didn't strike. He loomed, breathing into my face, and ground out:
— You'll leave here when I decide. And the way I let you out. Quiet. Convenient. Having understood your place. And if you keep twitching — we'll sit here longer. I'm on leave, Ariana. A whole ten days. Time to spare.
Ten days. He said it as a threat — and he was right, it was a threat. But I heard something else in it too: I had ten days and one sleeping night after another to find a way out. Ten days is a very long time for a woman who has nothing left to lose.
I lowered my eyes, slumped my shoulders — gave him exactly the picture he was waiting for: submissive, broken, "having understood." He hummed with satisfaction, drank off his wine and mine, taking my glass, and went upstairs again — a victor, sure the cage held.
And I stayed below. And, listening to the floorboards creak upstairs under his steps, to the bedroom door slam, to the house sink into the dense forest silence, I quietly, with just my fingers, slid open the kitchen drawer, took out that old dead phone and hid it, together with a charger I'd found, under the throw on the armchair.
He came down in the middle of the night. I wasn't sleeping — I sat in the armchair, knees drawn up, listening to the house. I heard his steps on the stairs too — but not sharp and vicious, as in the daytime, quiet, almost guilty.
— Not sleeping. — He stopped in the living-room doorway. In the dark I couldn't see his face, only the silhouette. — Cold in here on your own?
— I'm not cold.
— Liar. — He came over, crouched down in front of me, and in the glow of the burned-down fire I suddenly saw not the Mark who locked doors and threatened with Eli, but another one — the one a twenty-three-year-old fool had once, a thousand years ago, fallen in love with. — Ari.
Ari. He hadn't called me that in seven years. Not since I'd stopped being alive to him.
— Don't, — I said quietly.
— I have to. — He took my cold hands in his, and his palms were warm, hatefully familiar, painfully dear.
— I ruined everything, Ari. I know. I behaved like a monster — to you, to Eli, to everyone.
But I didn't bring you here to torment you.
I brought you because I realized: a little more — and I'd lose you.
For real. And only then did it hit me that without you I'm nobody.
I knew it was a lie. With my mind — I knew.
It was the same old performance, only instead of flowers and "let's start over" in the kitchen — night, forest, a locked house, and his measured, practiced tenderness.
And yet — that was the whole horror of it — my body, stupid, starved for a single kind word, answered to his warmth before my mind could intervene.
— Come. — He lifted me out of the armchair, carefully, the way you lift a sick person. — You're ice-cold. You'll warm up, and we'll talk. Just warm up, Ari, nothing more.
He led me upstairs, to the bathroom, turned on the hot water.
Steam crept over the tile, the mirror fogged — the very mirror I was afraid to see myself in.
He undressed me slowly, gently, whispering into my neck what I hadn't heard in seven years: "mine," "forgive me," "I love you, Ari" — and I stood shaking, hating myself because those words, false, used a thousand times, still held power over me.
We stepped under the water together. He held me from behind, and hot streams beat down on my shoulders, washing away — so it seemed to me for a second — all those seven years of filth.
He was tender. He knew how to be tender when he needed to — and in that lay his most terrible weapon, worse than fists and locked doors.
A fist you can resist. But this warmth, this "I love you" spoken into wet hair — how?
— See, — he whispered, — this is how it should be.
You and me. Forget the lawyers, Dana, these papers of yours.
What do you need the whole world for, when you have me?
I'll fix everything. We'll get Eli, go away, start over — just stop twitching, hear me?
Don't fight me. And everything will be fine.
And here, under this hot water, in the circle of his arms, I nearly believed.
Nearly melted, nearly sank against his chest, nearly said "yes, all right, just don't let go.
" A second — and I'd have gone back into the old life, willingly, gratefully, the way a bird goes back into the cage after it's forgotten the sky.
One word saved me. His. "Don't twitch." "Don't fight.
" Even now, holding me, whispering about love, he was really speaking about one thing only — that I stop fighting.
That I give up my papers, my job, my one chance to get my son back.
This tenderness wasn't reconciliation. It was the most cunning of all his attacks — a soft muzzle instead of a chain.
I closed my eyes, turned my face up under the water — so he wouldn't see the expression in them change. Let him think he'd won. Let him relax. Asleep, sated, sure he'd reclaimed his thing, he'd be less careful with the keys. With the phone. With the door.
— All right, — I whispered, and my voice didn't waver. — All right, Mark. Let's try.
He held me tighter, pleased, deceived — and didn't feel how, under the hot water, right against his chest, I clenched my fist until the nails bit into my palm. It was my promise. Not to him. To myself.
I didn't sleep. Lay beside him in the dark and listened to how evenly, how sated, he breathed — sure that the locked doors and the confiscated phone had done their work.
He was wrong. While he slept, I wasn't sobbing or gnawing my fists.
I was thinking — for the first time in seven years, not about how to please him, but about how to outplay him.
The house I'd already managed to go over that evening: I'd memorized where everything was, and the old push-button phone found in the kitchen drawer — dead, but a phone — together with a charger that fit was already waiting under the throw in the armchair.
All that was left was to pick the moment to plug it in unnoticed.
He thought he'd brought a broken woman into this cage, one he only had to finish off with silence.
He hadn't understood the main thing: the broken woman had stayed behind in that other, past life, on the floor of the locked bathroom.
And here, into his forest, he'd mistakenly brought another.
One with nothing left to lose. Which meant — truly dangerous.
I lay looking into the black ceiling, and I knew: out there, beyond the black wall of pines, were the road, Dana, my son, my life.
And quietly, with just my lips, I promised myself: I will walk out of here.
On my own feet, through that very door. And when I walk out — I'll come back not as a victim.
I'll come back as the one who's come to take back what's hers.
All that was left was to wait for morning. And not let him notice that the cage he'd built for me, I'd already begun to take apart brick by brick — from the inside.