It’s almost time for David to come home, and Chelsea wonders the same thing she does every day about this time: Will they have a good night, or a bad night?
She never feels small until her husband walks in the door. It’s not that he’s a big man—he’s of average height and resents that fact—but he works out all the time, and there’s just something about his presence that makes her shrink down.
Her job, on the surface, should be simple: Be a good wife, a great mom, a loving partner. But there are so many intricate rules she’s had to learn over the years. It’s like walking through a minefield every night, knowing full well where several old pitfalls lie in wait but also aware that there are new dangers to be discovered. He was such a sweet boyfriend in high school, and then they got married far too early because she had to get away from her mom, and he decided to go to college and bring her along, and her entire life shrank down to being pregnant in student housing and learning how to cook his favorite meals in their tiny cinder-block kitchen without setting off the smoke alarm.
Now, every weeknight, in the time between the garage door grumbling and the kitchen door opening, she wonders if it was a trap all along or just a natural progression that happened so gradually she didn’t notice, if she’s the frog in water slowly building to a boil.
His car door closes, and Chelsea stands where he can see her the moment he’s in the house.
“Girls!” she calls. “Dad’s home!”
The only answer from upstairs is rhythmic thumping, punctuated with shrieks of laughter. Brooklyn just got the new dance game for her fifth birthday, and it’s so rare the girls play together these days that Chelsea didn’t want to disturb them. David prefers it when all three of them greet him at the door, respectful and attentive and polite, lined up like golden retrievers, but…well, Chelsea doesn’t really want them down here. Not when he finds the letter and sees that their bank account is somehow, impossibly, overdrawn.
The door opens, and David’s smile sours. Instead of greeting Chelsea with a kiss, he takes off his blazer and carefully folds it over a chair.
“The welcome wagon’s quiet tonight.”
“There was an update to their favorite game,” Chelsea says, hating how meek and apologetic she sounds. “They’re playing together so nicely.” She goes up on tiptoe and wraps her arms around his neck, and he drags his nose along her jaw, breathing in the perfume he buys her every Christmas whether she’s run out or not. Beautiful, it’s called, the same one his mother used to wear. She tried a different one once, something she picked out herself, and he told her she smelled like burned sugar, not at all how a woman should be.
“My day was good,” he says, a reminder.
Her arms uncurl from his neck, and she drops down from her tiptoes and steps back. The look on his face is gentle and reprimanding but also somehow pleased to see her mess up. It’s the look her mother gave her when she was five and got sent outside to get a switch, as if it was a relief to have a reason to punish her. It makes Chelsea want to make things right, and she hates that. She’s always supposed to ask him about his day, but he never asks her about her day unless he’s trying to butter her up.
“I’m glad,” she answers, aiming for perky. “How’s the Hartford account going?”
His frown deepens. She asked the wrong question.
“Not well.” He looks around the kitchen, suspicious. “What’s for dinner?”
“Chicken Caesar salad.” She points to the fridge.
“Rotisserie leftovers?”
Chelsea flinches. “I tried to go to the store today, but it was all roped off. Something happened in the parking lot. Police everywhere, ambulances, yellow caution tape. Probably another shooting.”
“If it was a shooting, we would’ve heard about it already.”
God, he sounds like a tired kindergarten teacher when he talks to her like that, like everything she says is juvenile and stupid and disappointing, and she struggles to pick up her line of thought.
“Well, whatever it was, by the time I got out of the parking lot and through traffic to pick up Brooklyn, it was too late to cook. You said you don’t mind rotisserie over my Caesar.”
He makes a little noise, not quite an agreement, but more of an acknowledgment that perhaps he said that one day to make her feel better when she was gearing up for a pity cry, but they both know the truth.
“I’ll have a beer, then.”
She grabs a frosty bottle out of the freezer, where she’s supposed to put a few at four-thirty every day, and pops off the top. Sipping it, he heads upstairs to the spare room he considers his own private space and goes through his ritual of divestiture, the same one he’s observed since college, when they lived in that tiny one-bedroom. His blazer, hung up according to color. His shirt, tossed in the dry-cleaning bag. His slacks, clipped up by the hems to keep them from developing that telltale wrinkle at the knee. His shoes, on the shelf. Everything just so. No one sets foot in that room. No one. The gun safe is in there. His filing cabinets are there, every year’s taxes tidily tucked away. After she lost a diamond stud, he even brought up Chelsea’s jewelry safe so that he can keep better track of her jewelry wardrobe, offering her the embarrassing process of checking her own things in and out like a librarian until she, as he puts it, learns to act like a goddamn grown-up.
By the time he’s back downstairs in sweatpants and his undershirt, the beer bottle is ready to be recycled and Chelsea has caught up to where she should be in his preferred evening ritual. The girls are setting the table, and she’s smiling as she puts a new bottle in his hand, the glass perfectly chilled, just the way he likes it. The kitchen is almost silent, and he tells Alexa to play classic rock and sighs as Pink Floyd fills the airy room. Chelsea’s body goes tense the moment she hears it; she knows it does not bode well.
Dinner is a quiet affair. Brooklyn picks at her salad, and Chelsea knows that after she’s cleared the kitchen and David is safely out of the way, she’ll microwave some chicken nuggets and cut up an apple because of course five-year-olds don’t want to eat salad.
“When I was a kid, I ate whatever was put in front of me, or else,” David says, and it sounds conversational, but it isn’t. “You ate what you were given and you were thankful, or you went to bed without supper. I hated green peas, but if I didn’t clean my plate, my dad got out the belt.”
Ella and Brooklyn exchange looks, and Brooklyn shoves a piece of lettuce in her mouth, failing to hide her distaste. He nods; that’s the correct answer. Every time Brooklyn stops eating, he also stops eating and stares at her sternly until she digs in again. Ella is seventeen now, and so well trained at the table that she rarely speaks unless spoken to and always cleans her plate, which is a relief. Chelsea knows her job is to remain silent, although she can practically talk to the girls using just her face. David recently told her that it’s actually giving her these unattractive little frown lines that he’d like to see handled before the company picnic. She has learned to hide so much, but she can’t stop her microexpressions, can’t smooth out those lines to suit him, especially when she knows what’s coming.
He wasn’t like this when they started dating. He was fun and playful and sweet—or maybe, she thinks now, he excelled at hiding his own true self. When she told him she was pregnant, he was angry at first, but then he warmed to the masculine idea of being a father so early, began treating her like she was a golden egg that might crack if mishandled. On the day that Ella was born, he didn’t want to be in the delivery room; he said that if he saw her body doing something that disgusting, he would never look at her the same way again. And when he finally showed up to find her, exhausted and joyful, holding their tiny daughter in the hospital bed, he told her she should put on some makeup for the pictures or he couldn’t show them off to his friends. Those were the first cruel things he said to her, and at the time, she wrote it off as a joke. He hadn’t gotten much sleep, either.
The cruelties were like that: small and excusable, at first, but then building like snow on branches, slowly but surely weighing them down until they became fragile enough to freeze and crack and break and fall.
That’s what Chelsea feels like, sometimes: the Giving Tree, but for a wood chipper instead of a man.
After she’s urged the girls upstairs with a bag of cookies to play their dance game again until bedtime, which Ella will handle for her younger sister because she knows what’s going to happen, Chelsea clears the table before David can complain about it. He follows her over to the sink, waiting until she’s set down the dishes to pin her against the counter with a hand on either side, his beer bottle dangling from two fingers against her hip. She stills like a mouse in a shadow. Knowing something is going to happen doesn’t make it any more bearable.
“You know what you need?” he says, a little breathy, just behind her ear. She goes still, the water running over her hands, boiling hot. “A little spa weekend. Brian’s wife can tell you which one she goes to. A glass of Chardonnay, a couple of shots to tighten things up, a little waxing, some mani-pedi bullshit. Let your mom watch the kids and just focus on you.”
She goes from still to tense, her shoulders rising. Spas cost money. He hasn’t checked his desk. He hasn’t even seen the bank letter yet. If she mentions it now, he’ll blame her for everything.
“I don’t know,” she says, soft and harmless. “I mean, Botox is just botulism. Do I really need to inject myself with poison?”
He pulls back just a little, and she feels hot breath on her scalp, along her part. “Maybe go a little blonder. Highlights or some shit. That thing that sounds French.”
“Balayage.” Her voice is tiny. “That’s what I already do—”
“You’ve got to do some self-care,” he says, sounding like he’s parroting some garbage social media post. “Treat yo self.”
She switches off the faucet, and when she looks down, her hands are the raw, angry pink of an Easter ham. He sees it, too.
“And get a French manicure while you’re at it. That’s what the girls at the office do.”
David steps back, tosses his bottle in the recycling, and fetches a new one, popping it open with a smack on the granite countertops he insisted on when they bought the house. It was extra, and she didn’t think it was necessary, but he’s always been so obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses, with having whatever the guys at the office have. Settling back into the corner of the counter, he watches her, waiting for an answer. She can’t give him what he wants to hear, so she turns her back and cleans. Maybe if the sink is spotless and the counters gleam, he’ll stop focusing on her as the thing that needs fixing.
Even as she works, she knows that’s a lie. Cleaning is quite simply her job, and so is fitting into the impossible mold of Trophy Wife.
“What, I offer you a special weekend and you can’t even look at me?” Heat creeps up the back of her neck and cheeks. The beer is gone in several long swallows, and he slams it on the counter, making Chelsea’s shoulders jump. “You not even going to acknowledge your husband?”
Chelsea turns to him and swallows like she’s trying to get a pill down. She must’ve lost count of his beers, because he’s further along than she thought. She knows full well that her eyes are wide and red, her shoulders up around her ears, her hands red as lobster claws. She’s not pretty just now, and she feels so fragile and small, but the way he looks at her suggests that it only makes him want to break her completely. She is reminded of the time they were at the shore and he found dried-out, slightly broken sea stars on the beach and laughed as he crushed each one underfoot, pulling out the dainty white doves and pulverizing everything else to chalk.
“What the fuck are you looking at?”
It’s a snarl, somehow, and this time, she can’t stop herself from flinching.
It makes him angry, when she flinches. But he likes it, too.
This is how it happens. Bit by bit, even as she does her best to follow the rules and say the right things, she makes him angry and hot, and it feels like being driven farther down a hallway with no escape.
“You said you wanted me to look at you. So I’m doing what you said.”
He breathes out, a long sigh, almost a growl. “Why won’t you take care of yourself, Chel? We promised each other we’d take care of ourselves. Wouldn’t let ourselves go. You think I like going to the gym every fucking morning? You think it was fun getting hair plugs and Lasik, smelling my own fucking eyeballs get roasted? I put in the work. I do that for you. So you need to put in the work, too.”
She nods, blinking swiftly. “Jeanie from next door invited me to her kickboxing class.”
David snorts as he steps forward, closing the distance and grabbing her wrist. “Little bird bones. Think you can punch somebody with this thing? I said take care of yourself, not waste your fucking time. You wanna work out, use the treadmill I bought you. Swim some laps in your fucking pool. Don’t get all bulky and butchy. Jeanie’s built like a brick shithouse.”
She trembles and glances toward the stairs, checking that she can still hear music playing, even if the girls are no longer jumping around. She sees a shadow move and hopes it’s that wretched dog peeing on the banister but knows it’s probably Ella. She stares at the blotch of shadow and wills it to move, to go somewhere safe, but it remains firmly in place.
David spins her around and pulls her back against his chest, her back all along his front. He has an erection, prodding her spine, and the hot breath against her scalp is all beer. The world goes unfocused as he threads his other arm around her chest, sliding it up until his elbow perfectly frames her throat.
She’s gone from trembling to shaking now, her breath in little gasps. This is the point of no return, when nothing she can say or do will stop him. With his right arm cinched around her throat, he slides his left arm behind her head, grasps his own right biceps, and with infinite care and slowness tightens his grip.
He told her once that his dad called this the Cobra Hold, but she’s watched enough MMA with him to know that it’s a strangle. Time almost seems to stop. He holds her life in his hands, and she is caught in a moment of infinite horror, unable to move or fight or talk back or look at him or complain. As he slowly pulls it tighter, she can feel the blood in her veins pounding, going thick and sludgy, the world going hazy and dim.
She’s looked it up online. He’s cutting off blood flow to her brain. He could give her brain damage. Or kill her.
And they both know it.
Just as they know that this, what he does—it doesn’t leave bruises. No evidence.
She’s almost there, almost out, and she can’t stop the tiny little hitch of a breath that signals her giving up. For a moment, there’s nothing—no air, no sound, no her, no him, no time. And then, right before everything goes red and then black, he releases her and lets his arm slide down to her waist, a loving hug.
“I’ll tell Brian to tell Marissa to text you the place,” he whispers into the top of her head, his lips brushing that tender vulnerable place where her hair parts, her scalp now red and prickling as the blood rushes back in and he holds her up so she won’t fall.
Chelsea nods, the back of her head against his chest. There’s something almost comforting about it, something tender, the way he’s supporting her until she can fully stand again, and it makes her feel grateful, and she hates that. “Okay.”
He kisses her cheek. “Good. I’ll be in the man cave.” For a long moment, he pauses, as if expecting something more, but she can’t make the words work. “I love you,” he murmurs gently, a reminder.
Despite your many failures, she’s meant to understand.
“Love you, too,” she rasps, throat raw.
Without another look, he heads for the room off the garage, where he closes and locks the door. Chelsea leans into the counter, elbows on the cold granite, and silently cries. That, at least, is one thing she has learned to do exactly right.