Chapter 24 Ex Number Three
Ex Number Three
George
It’s been barely a week since we got back home from our cottage trip, but I’ve been walking on eggshells the whole time. Easy way to make a week feel like a year. Not that George seems to notice any difference. I wonder what that says about me, about how small I’ve made myself around him.
He’s been in and out of the house for work, same as usual. When he comes home from the office there’s always a big smile and a kiss for me. It would be easy to convince myself that nothing really happened, that it was all in my imagination, but I know in my bones what he did to me.
It was a relief when he announced his weekend away with the boys, fishing.
I should have been annoyed at the short notice, at the cavalier disregard for the film I’d mentioned I wanted us to see together—anything to get out of the house, to be perceived by public eyes, safe—but the relief was so complete that I simply said, Have a nice time.
I didn’t even press him on who these “boys” were, despite his having nowhere near enough friends to amalgamate into an ensemble.
Instead, my fingers were soon on the lightly cracked black screen of my phone, hesitant, dancing toward and just stopping before numbers on the dial pad.
I was ashamed of how long it had been, of what the voices on the other end of the phone might say.
But of course, a brief dial tone and a little conversation later, it was all okay. How could it not be? And now Claire sits in front of me, tea steaming from the full belly of the round mug warming her hands as she looks at me, contemplating.
“Emily should be here soon,” I say for lack of other words. “She’s on her way.”
Claire’s nose wrinkles in distaste. Upset as I was at Emily for abandoning me on my birthday all those years ago, it seems Claire has held the grudge in a tighter grip on my behalf, as a sister is wont to do. We sit in silence for a moment.
“So are you going to tell me?” she asks.
“Tell you what?” It’s only in contrast with hers that I hear how thin my voice has become, how it seems to rattle inside of me.
“It’s been months, Natty.”
“I know.”
My thumbs preoccupy my attention for a moment. It’s as if by the time I look back up, I will have escaped Claire’s scrutiny. As if.
I think of the distant memory of Aunty Dev for a moment. Wonder if Mother let their friendship wither and die because she knew the reunion could be this painful.
“You look thin,” Claire says.
“I know.”
The next moments take me by surprise. She bursts into tears.
Of the two of us, she has never been the crier, her bravery more real than my performances of it.
A hand clasped over her mouth does little to stifle her sobs.
Under normal circumstances, my arms would be around her shoulders, holding her close.
But these circumstances are anything but normal, and the months that have stood between us feel like a yawning chasm with her feet planted on one side, and my feet treading crumbling rock on the other.
I don’t know if she wants me to touch her, and that little uncertainty is a knife in my chest.
“Are you okay?” I manage to say, her sobs quietening.
“Are you?” she asks. In her eyes is an accusation. How dare you do this to yourself? How dare you let him do this to you? “You look like Mom,” she adds as another knife in the gut.
“Stop it.”
“You do. You look like Mom. Whatever’s going on here, you need help. You should talk to someone.”
“Like who?”
“Like a therapist.”
I don’t want to be our mother, but I can’t escape the fact that I seem to keep dating variations of our father.
Callous, selfish men who know how to turn on the charm when it suits them.
I look away, out of George’s kitchen window.
Staring at nature soothes me, even if being in the thick of it gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I’ve never been able to do spiders, creepy-crawlies, or big trees at night. Not up close. I look back to my sister.
“I’m not sure what to say.”
And then she does what she always does. The perfect thing.
She gets up from the other side of the kitchen island, walks over, and hugs me.
The weight of her love is crushing, so firm that it squeezes the pent-up emotions out of me, and I finally cry, too.
I haven’t once, yet. Not after what he did.
Not when I realized that just as Claire said, I was becoming our mother.
Tiptoeing around a home that didn’t feel like mine, with a man who felt like he was poised to hurt me.
When we finally let go of each other, it’s like all the awkwardness has been wrung out of us. We laugh, feeling the weight of it lifted, cheeks still wet. Claire drags her stool over beside mine, shuffles up, clasps my hands on the counter.
“Go on, then,” she says. “Tell me everything.”
And I do, Claire’s hands intermittently becoming claws on mine. She keeps her face passive for the most part, flinches flashing across her expression at some of the worst of it. It’s only when I get to the very worst that it gets too much, her nails suddenly in my skin.
“Claire, ouch! Fuck.”
“Sorry.” She’s obviously contrite. “I just—I just can’t believe he…Oh my god, Natty, this monster raped you and you’re still living in his home?”
My voice is smaller than ever. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice is bigger than ever. More desperate, too. “Shit, Natty, have you learned nothing from our parents? You take your shit and you get out!”
She’s wrong; I learned plenty from our parents.
I learned that sometimes playing dead keeps you safe, that confronting violence can simply raise the stakes, turning what would have been bruises into open wounds.
But I’m beginning to realize that playing dead can just as easily make you a predator’s plaything, just as easily leave you dead, a baby seal thrashed in an orca’s jaws.
“Nat, after Marc, after Luca…” She pauses for a breath. “You’ve got to be smart enough by now to see you’ve got to leave him. I can’t keep watching you make horrible decisions.”
For the first time since she’s arrived, I feel calm, icy certainty in my words. “Move out and what? Just let him get away with it?”
For the first time since she’s arrived, Claire seems unsure. “What do you mean?”
“I mean he did something pretty fucking awful to me, and he deserves to be punished for it.”
And there it is, that hunger. That knowledge of what I’m capable of, which I’ve tried to ignore and deny for years.
It’s obscured by the frustrating veil of black that descends upon my memories, blank nights followed by bloody mornings.
But through the darkness, a flash of roof, the sound of a fall.
A pill between two fingers, a water bottle, and an idea.
Tempting as it is to manufacture another staircase accident, George doesn’t have the alcoholism that ultimately gave our mother an easier time in getting the police to believe Dad fell.
Still, I’ve learned there’s a saw, hammer, and shovel in the shed in the communal garden.
Learned it’s smart to dig your holes before you have your body.
Learned where the good places to dig might be.
If George looks in the wrong place, he’ll find a plastic tarp in the flat.
If I hadn’t secretly borrowed a spare work phone, he’d see Reddit pages on hermetic containers, pigs, slit arteries in bathtubs, flooding my browser history.
But my fear of him leaves me frozen with indecision.
I don’t know how to convert my anger into action without the rush of alcohol or Class As, and yet I can’t afford to lose my faculties around a man like George.
“I don’t get it, Natty,” Claire says, although from her hushed tone, I think that she does.
“I get such heinous dick fog, but now that’s lifted, I can see things more clearly.
Sure, he has a good job and looks like a nice guy, but he’s abusive.
Why doesn’t he have any friends? Why have I never met his family?
He hurt me, and I’ll bet he’s hurt other women.
Bet unless I stop him, he’ll hurt someone else. ”
Claire’s question is barely a whisper. “ ‘Stop him’?”
“I’m talking about Marc, Luca…”
“They’re dead.”
“I know.”
Fear and concern wrinkle her forehead. “You’re not mak— They were accidents.”
“Were they?” The look I level her with is even and cool. There’s more calm composure in those two words than she’s seen from me in the past two years.
“I don’t get it. Wh—”
“I’m telling you I killed them, Care.”
Liquid catches at the back of her throat, and I think it’s the tea until I realize she’s choking on her own saliva. I get up, pat her back. She leaps up and away at my touch, and the air beneath my fingers turns icy at the absence of her.
“What the fuck, Natty? What are you talking about?”
No matter how much I want to retract it, I can’t take it back. “I don’t know how else to say it. I killed Marc and Luca.” And speaking these words out loud for the first time is a huge weight off my chest. Despite the horror on Claire’s face, eyes wide, mouth agape, I feel relief.
She steadies her hands on the counter. “Jesus Christ! You wouldn’t. I mean, how?”
My palms itch. “I’m not sure the details matter.”
Her mouth hangs open. I encourage her to sit back down, tell her as much as I can. By the time I’m finished speaking, Claire’s head is in her hands.
“What the hell, Natty? This is…I mean, talk about dropping a nuclear bomb.” She rubs her eyes, sits up, looks to the ceiling, looks to me, casts her eyes back down. “Wine. I need fucking wine,” she says. “Do you have some?”
I stand, pause. The smooth counter is cool under my palms. “We do, just…I can’t quite stomach red anymore. Is white okay?”
Understanding flickers across her eyes and she nods. “Yeah, of course.”