David has been speaking for at least forty minutes, and his story is worse than any I could have dreamed up. He’s talked of children and basement dens, of abusers and rape and plots. He’s spoken about a psychiatric ward and a woman so broken by her past that she was little more than a shell. He’s told me of her salvation – attempted, if nothing else – of her new life with her new man.
I’ve listened to this all in silence, numb from the words. How else is one supposed to listen to the impossible?
But eventually, words have to come.
‘David, why did you do this? Why couldn’t you have just let me be me?’
‘Don’t you understand, Amber, you needed help. I had to save you.’
‘I was thirty-six when we met,’ I say. ‘Thirty-six. If any of what you say is true, that was more than twenty years after whatever had happened to … me.’ It feels strange to speak about a past I cannot remember. ‘Can I really have been so bad, if I’d made it that long on my own?’
‘You were getting worse, Amber.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because the doctors told me that you were—’
‘You said the doctors had been giving dire diagnoses for years,’ I interrupt. ‘And yet still I lived my life.’
‘It was falling apart. You weren’t able to—’
‘You said I worked in a library, before you … did this. Read papers. Was content.’
He sighs. ‘Yes.’
‘So I was able to have a reasonable life. Even to enjoy myself.’
‘Amber, it wasn’t so simple as that,’ David protests. He has a pleading look in his eyes. ‘You were slipping away. More and more distant. More and more lost. If I hadn’t stepped in, it would have been the end of you.’
I pause, trying to absorb all he’s revealed to me.
Then, a single word. ‘Maybe.’
David peers up. ‘What?’
‘Maybe, David.’ I straighten myself. ‘Maybe I would have faded away. Maybe I was going the route you thought. But I had a life. I had a job. Maybe I’d even thought of a family. Can you really say you know? How could you? And now, how can I? You took all that from me.’
His eyes glass over. When he speaks, his voice trembles with emotion.
‘I’ve given you everything I could,’ he says. ‘Love, a home, a full life without all that pain.’
And I don’t know what to say, because despite everything else, he actually has. He has given me a life, together with him, that in almost every way was perfect. Our beautiful home. Our dog. Our trips. Our romance.
But he made me into someone new in order to do it. And I can feel the contours of another woman’s neck in my grasp, and the flesh of those men, and I know that David created more than he had bargained for. He had created a monster. A killer.
He had created me.
In the end, David’s stories are too much for me. What he’s revealed is beyond my comprehension. They are the ravings of a story too horrible to be true, yet too personal to be anything else.
I want to believe it’s all a lie, simply tagged on to the litany of others David has told me. I’m actually praying I’m being deceived – something that even in the moment feels horribly wrong. I want to believe I’m being taken for a fool. And I would, if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve gradually gone numb as David’s spoken – a numbness that isn’t nerves, or shock, or even horror. It’s the numbness of something inside me, fading away. Something new emerging. Parts of me that I’ve never realized were there, making themselves present. A whole life, a woman, I’ve never known.
And the reality of what she’s done.
The feel of the woman’s neck. The rope. The flesh of those men. The feel of the woman’s neck. The rope. The flesh of …
I look at David, unsure what I am meant to think of him. I want to hate him, but I still love him. I really do. I’d convinced myself he was a killer, but the killer was me. And yes, he made me into that, and I don’t know if that’s better or worse.
But I know it’s something I can’t live with.
My strength surprises me when I put it into action. In a single motion I’m up from the chair, and I push David back onto his ass on the floor as if he were a toy. He stares up, shocked, as I loom over him. For a moment our eyes lock, like they’ve done so many times.
‘I’m sorry David. This is over,’ I say flatly. ‘But it’s not finished yet.’
And without another breath, I storm out of the room. I sweep through our bedroom a floor below, grab what I need, and then race down the remaining stairs.
I’m out the door before David has regained his footing.