Chapter 8
Morning comes differently in the forest than in the city — not as a sunrise but as a slow gray seeping of the world out of the dark. I lay on the wide bed beside Mark and watched a stranger's ceiling emerge from the murk, stranger's beams, a stranger's — not my — life.
He slept, one arm thrown across my belly — proprietorial, heavy, as if even in sleep he kept holding on.
The night, the shower, his "I love you, Ari" — all of it still clung to my skin, warm and vile at once, like cooled honey.
I didn't move away. I lay still and waited for him to wake, to see who would come down to breakfast today: the nighttime Mark, whispering about love, or the daytime one, keys in his pocket.
The daytime one came down.
— Want coffee? — He stretched, yawned, and not a trace of the night's tenderness remained — as if it had washed away with the water. — Or don't you drink coffee anymore, now that you're proud?
— I'll have some.
We went down to the kitchen. Beyond the window stood the same dense forest, the same wall of pines, and I caught myself already mechanically noting: where the door is, where the keys are, how many steps to the car.
He made coffee, whistling, calm, pleased with himself, like a cat that's pinned a mouse under its paw and is sure it's not going anywhere.
— Listen, — he began, setting a cup in front of me, and his voice was soft, sympathetic, almost clinical. — I was thinking in the night. About you. About all this. And you know what I came to? You need to see a specialist.
— A specialist, — I repeated.
— Yes. A doctor. — He sat across from me, cupping his mug in both hands.
— Ari, you haven't been yourself these last months.
Hysterics, smashing dishes, you wrecked the mirror.
Now these… fantasies of yours — lawyers, divorces, "I'll take the child.
" Have you seen yourself from the outside?
It isn't normal. Normal women don't behave like that.
There it was. I knew this move — he'd tried it before, in small ways, but now he'd taken it up in earnest, thoroughly, as if he'd read it out of a manual. Shift the blame. Turn it around. Make it so that the guilty one, the sick one, the mad one, was me.
— So, — I said slowly, — I wrecked the mirror out of nowhere. Just because. And not because you brought a mistress into the house and made me watch.
— See? — He spread his hands, and there was almost grief on his face.
— Again. You twist everything. There was no mistress, Ari.
There was a colleague I let stay the night as a friend, because she had nowhere to go.
And in your head you blew it up into God knows what.
Got jealous over nothing and threw a wrecking party. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
My breath caught. Not from the hurt — from the ease, the smooth certainty with which he was rewriting reality. He spoke so calmly, so convincingly, that for one terrible second I almost doubted: what if? What if I really had exaggerated, invented, wound myself up? What if I really was sick?
That was exactly what he was after. That's exactly how it works: not with a blow, but with a quiet, drop-by-drop erosion of your own certainty about what you saw with your own eyes.
— I saw her in our bed, Mark, — I said, clinging to the fact like a handrail. — You tore the dress off her. In front of me.
— You imagined it. — He didn't even blink.
— You were on edge, you hadn't slept, you conjured up pictures for yourself.
It happens with exhaustion. With… instability.
That's why I'm saying — a doctor. A good doctor, I'll find one.
You'll lie down for a couple of weeks in the quiet, take what they prescribe, come back to yourself.
And I'll be right there the whole time. And Eli will be waiting for a healthy mother, not this…
— he waved a hand in my direction, — not all of this.
"Lie down for a couple of weeks." "Take what they prescribe.
" Suddenly I understood clearly, down to gooseflesh, where he was steering.
Locking me in the forest for ten days wasn't enough for him.
He wanted more — an official document, a diagnosis, a stamp that would make me incompetent forever.
A sick wife isn't given the child. A sick wife isn't heard by a court.
A sick wife can be kept anywhere and for as long as you like — and everyone will say "poor Mark, what he had to endure with her. "
— You want to have me committed, — I said. — To take Eli away for good. And so that no one believes a single word I say.
— I want to help you. — He covered my hand with his, and his hand was warm, as it had been in the night.
— Why do you always see an enemy in me, Ari?
I'm your husband. I've put up with you… I mean, loved you, for seven years.
Who else would take on someone like you?
Who would put up with you — sick, frayed, jobless, penniless — besides me?
And here he made the same mistake he always made: he couldn't stop.
It wasn't enough for him to persuade — he had to prick, to finish me off, to remind me how worthless I was.
And that prick, strangely, brought me to my senses faster than any slap.
Because I remembered: I have a job. I have Dana.
I have a lawyer. I have myself — the one who, over these days in the forest, hadn't broken but had hardened.
— You know what's interesting, Mark? — I gently, calmly freed my hand from under his.
— If I really am crazy, sick, imagining everything — then why did you lock me up?
You hide the knives from a sick person, not the house keys.
You didn't lock me up because I'm sick. You did it because I'm too healthy.
For the first time in seven years. And that scares you to death.
He jerked his hand away. His face lost all its clinical softness for a moment, baring what lay beneath — the cold, cornered malice of a man whose move hadn't worked.
— You don't understand what you're saying.
— I understand. For the first time in a long while — perfectly.
— I got up from the table, and my knees weren't shaking.
— Go ahead, look for your doctor. Lock me up for a month, if you want.
But the longer you keep me here, the more obvious one simple thing will be, when I do come out: it wasn't me who was sick.
— You're not coming out.
— I'll come out. — I looked him straight in the eye. — Everyone comes out, Mark. Even from here.
He didn't answer. Silently finished his coffee, stood, swept both phones off the table — his own and mine, the confiscated one — and went upstairs, into the room he kept locked.
A minute later muffled voices came from there: he was on the phone with someone.
I caught fragments — "her condition is worsening," "needs a consultation," "yes, I'll pay for a private room.
" He wasn't bluffing. He really was arranging it.
Everything inside me iced over. There was less time than I'd thought. Not ten days — maybe a day, maybe two, before he brought his "good doctor" or drove me to him himself.
I went to the window, pressed my forehead to the cold glass, and made myself breathe evenly. Panic was a luxury I could no longer afford. Victims panic. And I'd decided to stop being a victim back there, on the floor of the locked bathroom, among the shards. So — no fear. Think.
The plan was simple and therefore terrifying.
At night Mark slept deeply — I knew this from seven years, knew it better than he did.
At night he didn't turn the second bolt on the front door, because he was sure: nowhere for me to run, dense forest, no car, no phone, no signal. In that certainty of his lay the crack.
I had the old push-button phone hidden under the throw.
I had a charger. I had memory — the exact route: dirt road, turn, blue sign, two hours to the city, but only, it seemed, three or four miles to the highway if you cut straight through the forest. I had a jacket.
And I had legs that could still carry me.
All that was left was to wait for night. To get through the day playing the role he wanted to see: subdued, thoughtful, maybe even agreeable to "getting treatment." Let him relax. Let him believe he'd broken me for good, that his nighttime tenderness and his morning poison had done their work.
I turned toward the stairs, where his voice still carried down, and quietly, with just my lips, repeated what had become my prayer in that house: I will walk out of here on my own feet. And I'll come back not for forgiveness. I'll come back for my son.
He fell asleep around midnight — sluggish with wine, dinner, and his own self-satisfaction. I lay beside him, counting his breaths until they turned deep and even. Then another half hour — to be sure. And then slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I slid out from under his heavy arm.
The floor was ice. The house was silent. Somewhere in the armchair, under the throw, waited the phone charged in the night, with the single number driven into its memory — Dana's. And beyond the black window, beyond the wall of pines, lay the road I'd learned by heart.
I took the first step toward the door. And that step was louder than any scream I'd let out in seven years.