Chapter 5
Morning came gray and quiet, the way it always comes after a catastrophe — as if the world couldn't care less that something in it had collapsed for good overnight.
I never did lie down. I sat in the kitchen amid the stranger's night that clung to everything, and listened to them stirring, getting up, moving about behind the wall.
The shards of the mirror I'd swept up while it was still dark — not for him, for myself: I didn't want him finding me on my knees over broken glass.
Ella came out first. In his shirt — in his shirt, thrown over a bare shoulder — tousled, satisfied, with the lazy repletion of a cat that's gorged on someone else's cream. She saw me and didn't flinch. Didn't even slow her step.
— Aren't you going to offer coffee? — She leaned against the doorframe of my kitchen. — The night was… eventful.
— Should I call you a taxi? — I said acidly.
— Oh, and she even talks. — Ella smirked, glanced back into the apartment. — Mark, you said she was the silent type.
— Go get dressed, — came his voice from the bedroom. Not to me — to her.
She shrugged, slid a last look over me — sharp, appraising, as if calculating how soon this apartment would come free — and went back. To get dressed. In my bedroom.
Mark came out when the door had slammed behind her.
Fresh, well-rested, a towel over his shoulders — he'd even managed to take a shower in the bathroom where only yesterday I'd screamed among the shards of his bottles.
The tile, of course, he hadn't noticed. Men like him don't notice the marks — they leave them for others.
— Did you clear up the glass? — He opened the fridge, took out juice. — In the bathroom. Sweep it all up?
— No, — I said. — And I don't intend to. You broke it — if not with your hands, then some other way. Everything broken in this house, you broke. So sweep it up yourself.
He froze with the glass in his hand, as if he hadn't heard right.
— What did you say?
— You heard. The shards in the bathroom are yours. Like everything else. I'm done cleaning up other people's traces after you.
— Someone's in a mood, I see. — He poured the juice, drank, set the glass on the table between us like a glove thrown down in a ring. — Well, go on. Let it out. Just make it quick, I've got things to do.
And then I understood: he was waiting for my tears.
Waiting for the usual — the hysterics, the pleading, the "how could you," and then my breakfast as a sign that everything had slid back into its rut.
For seven years that script had worked without fail.
For seven years I'd been the leading, obedient actress in it.
I didn't cry.
— I'm filing for divorce, — I said.
He froze with the glass at his lips. For a fraction of a second — just a fraction — something living flickered in his face: not fright, no, more like the surprise with which you look at furniture that's started to speak. And then he laughed.
— For divorce. — He shook his head as if I'd said something sweet and stupid. — Ariana. We've been through this. Every time it's "I'll leave," "I'll divorce you," and by morning you're frying me eggs. Remember? So don't make me laugh. Sit down, have some tea, calm down.
— Not this time.
— Every time. — He leaned toward me across the table, and his voice dropped, turned insinuating, velvet, the very tone that always chilled me inside.
— You're not going anywhere. Nowhere to go.
Nothing to go on. Have you forgotten? Let me remind you.
The apartment — mine. The money — mine. Everything you've got on your back — bought by me.
All you have to your name is seven years of emptiness and a degree fit only for hammering nails.
Who'll take you? Where will you go? To a shelter?
He drove each word in like a nail, with the precise, practiced relish of a man who'd spent years studying where to strike to hurt most. And the most terrible thing — before, it had worked.
Before, these words had folded me in half like a blow, and I'd start begging him not to leave me, because he was right: I had nowhere to go.
But today I listened — and didn't fold. Today I heard not a verdict but a set of instructions. A list of what I'd have to win back: money, a name, a roof, the right to my own life. He thought he was reciting my chains. He was reciting my plan.
— Are you finished? — I asked.
He blinked. For the first time that morning — thrown off.
— What?
— I'm asking whether you're finished frightening me.
Because I'm not afraid of you anymore, Mark.
That's the thing. Yesterday you did the one thing you shouldn't have — you overdid it.
You know what happens when you push a person down too low?
At some point they stop being afraid of falling. There's nowhere left to fall.
— Look at that. — He set the glass down, and the juice sloshed over the rim. — She woke up. And who woke you — did I do that, by any chance?
— You did, — I said, and it was the plain truth, and it made his cheek twitch.
— You. Last night. Thank you. For seven years you put me out drop by drop, and yesterday you poured too much on at once — and I caught fire.
It happens, Mark. You pour and pour — and then one drop too many, and it all goes up.
— Pretty words. — He smirked, but the smile came out crooked. — Read them in a book, while you were waiting up for me? Nothing better to do.
— There was something to do. Waiting for you. That's a full-time job, you know — waiting for a man who doesn't come. No days off. Seven years without a single vacation.
Something in this calm of mine unsettled him more than any tears. He was used to my sobbing, the way you get used to background noise — but the silence, the steady voice, the direct gaze were a foreign language to him, and it angered him that he couldn't understand it.
— Fine, — he ground out, switching tactics, and his voice suddenly went softer, lower, more insinuating.
I knew this shift of his — that's how water changes just before it goes from warm to scalding.
— Fine, Ariana. I overdid it, I admit. I was drunk yesterday, it all got out of hand.
You know I'm not like that. We've been together seven years.
Seven years, Ariana. You don't throw that out over one stupid night.
— One? — I nearly laughed. — Mark, I don't have enough fingers on my hands to count your "one stupid nights." And if I count the ones I don't know about — not enough on my feet either.
— I'll change. — He stepped toward me, took my hands in his, and his palms were warm, familiar, treacherously familiar. — Hear me? We'll start over. We'll go somewhere, just the two of us, like before. Remember how it was before?
And here — I'm ashamed to admit — something in me wavered. Not love. The memory of love, its empty shell, but even that was enough to make my head spin for a second, to make me want to believe, to fall back into that warm, familiar swamp where at least you don't have to decide anything.
He felt that crack. He always felt them.
— There we go, — he whispered, drawing me closer. — There's my girl. You're not going anywhere. And neither am I. What are we without each other.
And at that very moment — God knows why — over his shoulder I saw Ella in the bedroom doorway.
Dressed, purse in hand, ready to leave. She was watching us — this little scene of reconciliation of ours — and smiling.
Not jealously. Indulgently. The way you watch a trained dog jump through the same hoop for the hundredth time.
That smile sobered me faster than any slap.
I saw us through his eyes, through her eyes — through the eyes of all those women who'd passed through this apartment: the pathetic wife you can humiliate at night and reel back in the morning with one "remember how it was before.
" A toy on a string. A hoop. A little dog.
I tore my hands away.
— No.
— What — no? — The smile slid off his face.
— No, I don't remember how it was before. — My voice didn't shake. — I only remember how it's been all these seven years. And how it was last night. That's enough. Take your guest away, Mark. And start getting used to the idea that there won't be any more "before." Not before, not now, not later.
Ella huffed and walked out — heels clicking down the corridor, the front door slamming. We were left alone, and that was when it truly broke out of him.
— So we've grown proud? — He moved closer, and his face twisted with the anger — the real kind he usually hid under boredom.
— Threatening me with divorce? And have you thought how it'll end for you?
You do understand that if you so much as twitch — I'll leave you with nothing. And Eli you won't see. Ever.
He threw our son's name like a knife into the back — knowing exactly where it would land.
Eli. My boy. My one true thing in these seven years — and my deepest, unhealing wound.
Six years old. Six years, half of which he'd lived not with me but at his grandfather's, at Mark's father's, a couple of hours upstate, in a small town, because one day Mark decided: the child would be in the way.
In the way of his work, his life, his women, his freedom.
— He's not with us anyway, — I whispered, and my voice trembled for the first time that morning.
— You already took him from me. Gave him to your father, the way you send spare furniture off to the country house.
"He'll be in the way" — remember? That's what you said about your own son. About a living child. In the way.
— And I was right, — he snapped, without a shadow of doubt. — At his grandfather's there's order. Routine, discipline. With you he'd have come completely unglued — you can't even manage yourself. Be grateful I even let you visit him.
"Let you visit." Your own son. Each of these words dropped onto the scales inside me — and outweighed the last seven years all at once.
Something in me clicked into place. Quietly, without a crash. The way a dislocated bone slots back — with a pain that darkens your vision, but after which you can finally walk.
— You know, Mark, — I said very calmly, and my calm made him falter, — up to this minute I might still have doubted. Might still have clung to some "what if." But you just said Eli's name — to hurt me. And with that you decided everything.
— What are you babbling about.
— You can take the apartment from me. The money. My name. You can throw me out onto the street in what I'm wearing — I'll survive. But my son you will give back. Not because I'll ask. Because I'll take him. Whatever it takes — I'll take him.
He looked at me, and for the first time in seven years I saw on his face not boredom, not superiority, but confusion. He didn't recognize me — and that frightened him more than any shout of mine.
— This is Dana's doing, — he ground out, retreating to familiar ground. — Your divorced little friend. She's jealous, so she's egging you on. She wants you to end up as lonely as she is.
— Don't touch Dana.
— Or what? — He loomed over me again, and all his brief unease gave way to the old, cold superiority. — What will you do to me, Ariana? Hm? Smash some dishes? Scream? Break another mirror? Go ahead. I'm even curious how far you'll get.
He grabbed me by the chin — with that very gesture he'd used a hundred times, certain I'd go limp as always. His fingers dug into the skin.
— You're mine, — he said quietly, looking into my eyes. — Every last bit of you. And you will never, hear me, never leave here. Because without me you're nothing. An empty space. I made you, and I can unmake you.
I didn't look away. For the first time.
— Take your hand off me, — I said. Quietly. But in a way that made him hear something new in it — something that hadn't been there in all seven years.
And — strangely — he took it off. Unclenched his fingers, stepped back, as if he himself didn't understand why he'd obeyed. Silence hung in the kitchen, ringing, taut as wire.
— By the way, — I added, and nodded toward the corridor where Ella's heels had just clicked.
— Your guest left without a taxi. Maybe catch up, call her one?
You're so caring, after all. Worried about the glass on the floor, that no one cut a foot.
Take care of her too. It suits you — caring for anyone at all, except your wife and your son.
— I made you, — he repeated, but now without his former certainty, as if talking himself into it rather than me. — Remember that.
— No, Mark. — I stood up, and it was easier than I'd thought — just to rise and be level with him. — You didn't make me. You buried me. And what's buried sometimes sprouts. More's the pity for you.
He left, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the windows. And I stayed standing in the middle of the kitchen — and suddenly noticed that my hands weren't shaking. For the first time in a very long while.
I went to the window. Beyond the glass an ordinary, everyday morning was graying — people going to work, cars driving, life flowing on as if nothing had happened. And somewhere out there, in that life, there was a place for me too. I'd simply forgotten it for seven years.
I took out my phone. My fingers still trembled a little — but no longer from fear, from something else, sharp, almost forgotten. From resolve.
"Dana. I'm ready. Tell me about that job. And give me your lawyer's number, please."
The reply came instantly, as if she'd been sitting all this time with the phone in her hand, waiting: "Finally, sweetheart. Finally. I'll come get you in an hour."
I set the phone down and let my eyes travel over the kitchen — our kitchen, where for seven years I'd made him coffee, swallowed tears, gathered shards. It suddenly looked foreign to me. Not mine. A set for someone else's terrible life, out of which I was finally beginning to walk.
He thought that last night he'd finished me off. And this morning he was still sure of it — standing there spitting poison, driving in his nails, not noticing that he was striking no longer into the living, but into the emptiness I'd already stepped out of.
He was used to every fall making me more obedient. He didn't know one thing: from the very bottom there's only one way. Up.
And I meant to walk it all the way — to the last step. And on the top one, I already knew, I would stand not with a plea. With a verdict.