Good for Gone
Jen Conley
I’m going to tell you the truth. You don’t have to believe me, but I need to be heard. I need to tell you what love did to me.
Earlier tonight, I stood over my husband at the side of the bed holding a gleaming butcher knife, my hands shaking, my mind saying, He deserves it. Kill him.
My husband didn’t know I was there. He just snored on. His mouth open. His sleep apnea creating short quick pauses, then the chig chig sound burbling from his throat, followed by the release of breath. Sometimes he put the mask on before bed, looking like he’d emerged from some Rod Serling creation, and I’d once joked about it. “Episode 39, Season 7.”
“There is no season seven in the Twilight Zone,” he snapped, the snark dripping through his mask.
I told him I was kidding. That I knew there was no season seven of the Twilight Zone, which I secretly didn’t know because I wasn’t into science fiction.
I understand this part isn’t important, but I tell you this just to remind you that he was a complete asshole.
Tonight, he decided not to wear the mask. He said it was too uncomfortable. Which meant I would be kept up from the snoring or I would have to sleep in the spare room. The former would make me a pathetic good wife and the latter would make me a bitch. Both choices were unacceptable. Why didn’t he go into the spare bedroom?
There I was, watching him burble, the knife in my hand, wincing at what a disappointment my life had become. Twenty-five years of marriage and it came down to this: me holding a knife over him. Honestly, at that moment, the thought of using the knife was more of a distant reality, something that could happen. You’re angry, Katie. But I was always so fucking angry. Angry at him, angry at myself for being such a dutiful wife, angry at my fidelity. My ability to stand by this marriage, the good times and “the bumps in the road,” was everlasting and absolute.
It was disgusting.
Then a quick flash of memory burst in my mind: my mom, hardworking and stoic, standing by the small counter in our old two-bedroom house, her back to me, slicing a carrot she’d grown in her garden. She was in shorts and her thin legs were bare, the pale skin purplish with veins women who’ve spent their entire lives on their feet get. She swung around, holding the knife, her brow puckered up. “What’s this guy’s name again?”
“Jim, Mom. I told you.”
I’d loved Jim Marino in high school, but from afar, sometimes smiling at him when he passed by me in the halls, but he never noticed. He was two years older, lanky and shadowy, not one of the popular kids or even the cool dorks. I’d watch him through the window of my Honors English class—Jim Marino on the side of the school, sneaking a cigarette, donning a Metallica T-shirt, his longish dark hair waving in the wind, always hanging out with boys who were trouble. I was smart and self-aware enough to understand that my attraction to him was your standard, ridiculous cliché. Good girl loves bad boy. I, of course, had been studious, well-behaved, had lived with only my mom who I never wanted to disappoint, my mom who worked her ass off as a nurse, who asked me to do chores around the house not because she wanted to make me responsible but because she actually needed the help. “Jim only goes out with girls who give it up,” my best friend, Michelle, warned me after I confessed my attraction. “Go out with Brian,” she suggested. “He’ll be nicer to you.” My junior year, long after Jim graduated, I did go out with Brian, and I did fall in love with him and we did have a pleasant relationship. We lost our virginity together, with all the proper protections. My mother took me to the gynecologist and had me put on the pill, and the gynecologist talked to me about my decision to have sex with my boyfriend. “You want to make sure you want to do this, because there’s no going back.” She sounded like a Judy Blume book.
Anyhow, it happened and then he went away to college and I went away to college and both of us professed to stay faithful, to call each other, to send letters, to be true. I kept to the bargain and it appeared Brian had done the same. I even had proof. “Brian is crazy in love with you,” one of his buddies from college said. He also winked at me—I remembered that. Then he said, “We can’t get Brian away from his Katie.” His Katie. The term sent a light swirl of bile up my throat. Still, I carried on with the relationship like the loyal Girl Scout I’d been as a kid. Brian even talked about the “Afterward,” about living together before getting married. “We should buy a house first.” He knew my mom had no money to help with anything. I had gone to college on a slew of academic scholarships, although I had to settle for a second-rate college to get the free ride. It didn’t matter because Brian was planning to be an accountant so sticking with him was a smart choice. “He’s a good one,” Michelle told me. “You’re a lucky girl.”
The bile came again.
Still, and still, up until that point, I kept at my studies in college, majoring in English because I liked books, keeping that 3.9 GPA because that’s what girls like me did, even if there were no jobs except high school teachers for English majors—which I realized during my senior year was the point. I had unwittingly groomed myself to be an educated housewife. “We should think about where we want to live,” Brian said. “So we could apply for jobs in the area.”
“Okay,” I answered.
“Are you going to teach?”
I didn’t want to teach. I had no idea what I wanted. All those years studying like a workhorse, volunteering in the hospital where my mom was employed, taking SAT courses, securing academic scholarships, and after that, busting my ass to get great grades in college had brought me to this: I don’t know.
Brian suggested paralegal work. “It’s good for extra money,” he said, meaning he secretly agreed with the educated housewife plan.
Yet at the time, if I were really honest with myself, really truthful, bone chillingly truthful, I would’ve admitted that I did know. And what I wanted was to be dazzled, dazzled by a guy, one of those rocker types, cowboy types, biker types. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be yanked out of my planned and wholesome future. I wanted something crazy, wild, something breathtaking, something mysterious. I wanted a love that would rip my heart out like every ridiculous yet not ridiculous novel that had been written in the 1800s. How I loved Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, and how I loved those Merchant Ivory movies. That scene in A Room with a View where George Emerson walks into that field in Italy and grabs Miss Lucy and kisses her with such passion, I could almost feel it myself just by watching it on screen. And I had secretly loved that Anna had thrown herself in front of that train because she’d given up everything for love and love had been cruel to her and this is where you ended up—underneath a train. But for love! Love! Oh, and how I adored Heathcliff, and how he loved Kathy, and how he never recovered. I wanted that love. I wanted to never recover! I wanted a wild, intense, obsessive, fanatic love that would make me feel like Miss Lucy in that Italian field.
So sometimes, secretly, I would think of Jim Marino. I wondered where he was, what he was doing, whether he was a drug addict or not.
I could help him get off drugs, I’d think.
Then sweet Brian would burst into my brain, wearing his clean blue T-shirts and gray shorts, his skin tanned from the three-mile jogs he did every day, his face horror-struck at my thoughts. I’m a good guy…why would you think this way? Dutifully I would chase those ridiculous passions away.
“Do you want a gold or silver wedding band?” Brian asked before he got on a plane at Newark one day. He was doing a three-week stint in Mexico over winter break, working for a charity organization because he said he believed in giving back. I was staying in New Jersey.
“Gold is traditional,” Brian said.
Then he flew off into the sky, like a clichéd metaphor.
That night, Michelle and this girl Stacey and I went out. It was supposed to be a quick drink, but Stacey had decided we needed to go down to the beach.
It was a frigid winter night in Seaside Heights, the ocean wind whipping us relentlessly when we got out of the car. “Why are we here?” Michelle shouted.
“Because we have nothing else to do!” Stacey shouted back.
We sat at the far end of the bar, drinking Long Island Iced Teas and Stacey smoking a cigarette. It was decorated more for a summer crowd: green plants in big pots stood in the corners; the walls and ceiling paneled in light wood; a surf board hanging over the bar. It wasn’t crowded and the guys who were there weren’t college boys but guys in bands or guys working shitty jobs, guys with no future.
“This sucks,” Michelle said and right when she said that, I turned my head and saw Jim Marino across the room. Jim Marino from high school! Jim who never said a word to me. His hair was still long, much longer than ever before. He wore a flannel under his leather jacket and black jeans and dirty high top white sneakers and he was standing off with a rough group of guys. He saw me, then turned to one of his friends, and then, then, began walking toward me. Walking casually but quickly, half smiling, his eyes never leaving me no matter how many times I looked down at my drink and then back again. After years of watching him in school, years of wishing he would speak to me, he was walking toward me. He knew me!
“Didn’t we go to school together?” he asked.
Michelle and Stacey knew him too. “Yeah,” they said but he only flicked his eyes at them, then back to me. It was true, since high school I’d lost my baby face, grown my hair long, wore red lipstick. He grinned. “You’re looking great, Katie.”
He even knew my name. I wanted to die.
He asked me questions about college, what I was studying, about my favorite books because I’d told him I was an English major. He asked me to play pool, bought me a drink, and another. Michelle and Stacey played pool too and he bought them drinks. Deep down he was a gentleman! But in the end, the very end, when Last Call was made, when only a couple of his friends remained, he invited us all back to his apartment. “Winter rental,” he said, and we walked the two blocks in the bitter ocean wind only to end up at a two-bedroom apartment above a closed-for-the-season pizza parlor.
I followed him to his tiny room because he had to show me his books—the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, a Ray Bradbury short story collection, a book of poems by Bukowski.
“I’m into Bukowski,” he said earnestly, and I couldn’t believe a guy like Jim Marino would know any poet. He hadn’t even gone to college. Then he kissed me because, “I can’t not,” he said. I confessed I had a boyfriend who was working for a charity organization in Mexico and he said, “Oh, that makes me feel like shit,” and I went home with my friends. “That was interesting,” Stacey said, and Michelle talked about how lame the entire night was, and my mother was half asleep on the couch when I walked in.
“You drunk?” she said.
“No.”
Of course, I was a little drunk. And of course, I went back to the bar alone the next night. I was aware that it looked desperate, aware that girls who went to bars by themselves looked pathetic, but in I went, the cold ocean air slapping the door behind me.
“I think I left my wallet here last night,” I told the bartender. I noticed Jim in the back, holding a pool stick.
“No wallet, honey,” the bartender said.
I waved to Jim and walked up to him. “I thought I left my wallet here. But I didn’t.”
Jim grinned and leaned into me, his mouth near my neck and it sent my heart battering so wildly I thought I might faint. “Let me buy you a drink,” he whispered.
Later, I asked if he’d found my wallet at his apartment.
“Nope. But you can come by and check.” He shrugged, and I followed him through the bitter ocean wind to his apartment.
“You didn’t lose your wallet, did you?” he said, and I said no.
“You’re still with your boyfriend, aren’t you?” he said, and I said yes.
“I’m not like that,” he said. “I don’t take women from their men.”
“I don’t believe that.”
He said he was telling the truth. “You need to make a decision if you want to be here or at home, waiting for your boyfriend.”
I wasn’t sure whether I believed Jim was this noble. He stepped closer and a lonely, deep moan from the ocean wind sounded through the eaves of the apartment building.
“I want to be with you,” I said.
Jim kissed me. He put his hand on my waist. Kissed my neck. Kissed my lips and then he broke away for a brief second, walked backwards, kicking the door shut with the bottom of his sneaker. That’s what did it—he kicked the door shut! It drove me off the edge. He’d won me right there.
I kissed him, unbuckling his jeans—something I never did with Brian. I’d always been too timid to be so bold.
“Here we go,” Jim said.
It was magical, awkward, stunning—that’s how I remember it now. He took my breath away. I loved him. The love came that fast.
I returned the following night, then the following, and soon we were a thing, without anyone ever knowing. Surprisingly, I felt no guilt about Brian. I knew I should, I actually tried to feel it, but I couldn’t. I was too consumed with my new secret boyfriend, too wild with love, a real love, to give a shit about Brian. Then, as quickly as my thing with Jim started, it had to end. I had to go back to college. Winter break was over.
“Back to your man,” Jim said.
“Yes. We’re going to get married,” I told him sadly. “We have it all planned.” We were in Jim’s bed, wrapped around each other like these were our last moments. The ocean winter wind blew dramatically, banging against the walls. We could’ve been tucked away in a cottage in the English Moors.
Later, when I was in my dorm, deep in my bones, I realized this sad sack of a story, we’re going to get married, we have it all planned, was as calculated as tossing a fishing line into a tiny, well-stocked pond. I knew exactly what I was doing. I’d been an honor student. I knew how to write a story.
Jim called me at college. “I only think of you. Day and night. It’s making me crazy.” He mailed a poem he’d written for me.
You are my moon
You are my ocean
I dream of you at daytime
I long for you at nighttime
But you’re not there.
I cringed when I read it. Yet I called him and he answered and asked if he could come down and visit me at college, which was near Atlantic City. “We can stay at the Taj Mahal because my dad gave me a comp room.” His father was one of those loser weekend gamblers you see in Atlantic City often.
I agreed. That weekend I drove over to the casino and waited dutifully in the lobby, the distant ringing of the slot machines floating through my ears.
He was late.
When he finally arrived, he walked straight at me, dropping his bag and kissing me. “I’m fucking desperate,” he said, kissing me again, then hitching his bag and mine over his broad shoulders, and grabbing my hand and tugging me toward the elevator. We went up to the hotel room and he said, “I don’t deserve you. I know your man is better. He can offer so much more, but I wish you’d give me a chance.”
“You’re asking me to change my future,” I said slowly, carefully.
Jim took a breath. “I love you. I want to marry you.”
That was it. Mission accomplished, fish hooked. I’d gotten my big love, my big romance. By summer I’d already sat down with my real boyfriend in a diner, delivering my news, that it wasn’t him, it was me. “I’m just confused, and I need to be on my own for now.”
He was stunned, water welling in his eyes. “I knew something was wrong,” he sniffed. “You’ve been distant.”
“It’s not you.” I grabbed his hand and he let me hold it for a long, horrible moment until I pulled it away. “It’s me,” I said.
He got up, left a ten-dollar bill on the table because he wasn’t the type of man to leave me with the check, and disappeared from my life.
I sighed and shut my eyes. Finally, the guilt smacked me, and I honestly went to my car and cried.
“He’ll get over it,” my boyfriend said.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “He really loved me.”
“You think I want to hear that?”
We were at a bar, sitting across from each other and a waitress walked by. Just for a split nano-second, his eyes flicked to her ass, and then back to my face.
It was a red flag. I saw that now.
“You don’t have to tie yourself down,” my mom said after I had just accepted the proposal. I was twenty-five, a perfect time for getting engaged.
“Why don’t you want me to be happy?”
We were in the kitchen and my mother was chopping carrots she had grown in the garden, her back to me. “I’m just saying.”
“Most mothers would be ecstatic if their daughter was getting married.”
My mother kept chopping.
“What is it?” I let out a tired, irritated breath. “Is it because of what happened last year?”
“I didn’t say anything.” She chopped some more.
“He explained it to me. He made a mistake. People make mistakes and people forgive.”
The forgive thing had been meant as a mean dig. My father had cheated on my mother and she kicked him out and he never came back again, never paid child support, never visited, never called. I barely remembered him, and he remained the man who tossed me in the air when I was little and let me tag along to get bagels on Sunday mornings.
“You never even gave Dad a chance to try again.”
My mother kept chopping, her back still to me. “I gave him plenty of chances. He just fucked them all up.”
“Sure,” I snapped.
My mom swung around, knife in hand, ready to say something but stopped, her breath out in the air but her words yanked back in her throat. She returned to her carrots.
Let me clarify: when that thing before he proposed happened—he’d cheated—we were already dug in deep. We’d already bought a couch and a television and had a year lease on an apartment. In my eyes I had no choice but to believe him when he said it had been a mistake, that it would never happen again. Besides, where was I going to go? I hadn’t started any real career. I had nothing but our future. So I checked his pockets when I was doing the laundry. I went through his mail, peeked in his wallet. Nonchalantly asked questions. Always put my hand on the hood of his car if I came home after him. “Did you just get in?” I’d say and if he said no, and the hood was cold, I’d know he was telling the truth.
We got married at a small restaurant near the beach. We went to the Poconos for a three-day honeymoon because we couldn’t afford Hawaii, or even Bermuda. “I know I don’t have much money,” he told me. “But we will someday, I promise.” Our son arrived within a year. A daughter followed. I had no time to read my books. Then there was a bump in the road, a really monstrous bump, and it blew up in my face and shattered my psyche worse than the girl he’d hooked up with that one night, months before he proposed. His co-worker, some woman named Sherrie, was the bump. I remember the day I found out. My two small kids fluttering around my legs when Sherrie’s husband arrived on my doorstep, handing me photos taken by a private detective he’d hired. Snapshots of my husband and a woman with curly blonde hair walking into a hotel room together. Photos of the two of them sitting by a lake, snuggled up against each other. Pictures of them kissing. “I can give you copies,” Sherrie’s husband said. “For your divorce.”
I thought about divorce, yet where would I go with two kids? I had no choice but to see a marriage counselor and believe it or not, the counselor declared there was enough love between us to work things through.
“I was wrong,” my husband said. “But you never trust me. Your suspicions and questions create a self-fulfilling prophecy for you and me.” The counselor didn’t agree but he did point out that if I were less paranoid, perhaps my husband would be less inclined to look elsewhere.
Classic bullshit, I see that now too. I remember that evening I wished my husband dead. If he was dead, I’d get his life insurance and I’d get the cheapest coffin, or better, keep it really cheap and cremate him. I could date again. I was still young, still pretty.
Within seconds though, another thought hit and sickened me: Who would want me with two children?
That day, my kids were with my mom for the hour. “We’re just having some money trouble,” I told her when I picked them up.
My husband had lost his job because of the affair—Sherrie was a co-worker. “I may have to go back to work,” I said. “It’s been hard on us.”
My mother was slicing a carrot for the kids. “Do what you have to do.”
Soon, Sherrie was left in the past and we carried on. My husband found a new job, but I kept my new part-time paralegal position. I hated it, found it boring as hell, but we’d gotten used to the extra money. I was still paranoid, still suspicious, but I tried to keep quiet about it. Sometimes, on my off days, I’d put the kids in the car and drive by his new job, checking to see if his car was in the parking lot. At home, I checked his wallet and pockets and drawers. We had cell phones at this point and I secretly poured through the statements. When I confronted him with any suspicions he told me I was crazy.
Sometimes I thought I was crazy.
When my mother was dying of cancer, she said, “You can leave him.” There had been another woman, some woman he’d met at a bar. He’d bought a burner phone to keep in touch with her. My daughter, thirteen at the time, turned him in. “Dad’s got an extra phone,” she said, inflaming my rage.
“There’s no shame in divorce,” my mother said.
“We can work it out,” I countered. “We’ve done it before.” Because I don’t want to end up alone, like you.
My mom shook her head weakly, reading my thoughts. “You mistake loneliness for unhappiness. I liked my life. Was I lonely? Sure. Could I use a good man? I always hoped I’d meet someone, but I didn’t. I wasn’t unhappy. The divorce was the best decision I ever made.”
There’d been more women, I was sure of it, but I grew tired of playing Nancy Drew. Tired of confronting my husband when he grew preoccupied and distant, as cheating men always do. Tired of him saying, “You’re crazy.” I couldn’t believe he’d turned into this—this cheating asshole. Hadn’t he been so in love with me when we were young? Hadn’t I been what he wanted? It was so exhausting. I hadn’t read a book in years. I didn’t know what happened to my old self. I just know I grew sick of crying, sick of my stomach twisted in knots when I found out yet again he was fooling around. Sick of thinking it was my fault, that I’d fulfilled another self-fulfilling prophecy. Sick of talking myself into staying. Sick of lecturing myself that women throughout history had dealt with the same thing. Jackie Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, even the Queen of England if you believed the Netflix show, The Crown.
Then, a week ago, I had a horrific pain in my abdomen, fierce enough to scare me to the emergency room. “I think it’s my appendix,” I told the nurse.
“We’ll check.” They did x-rays and a young doctor, distracted and without an ounce of bedside manner, told me they had found spots on my pancreas.
It was a cinder block hurled at me. “Cancer?” My mother had died of pancreatic cancer.
“I can’t say for sure. Could be your gallbladder. Could be something else.” He gave more possibilities and sent my films to a specialist. “They’ll call you as soon as possible.”
At home, my husband said, “It’s not cancer. Cancer isn’t painful.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I shouted. “My mother! You know my mother!”
He squeezed my hand and told me it was going to be all right.
I sniffed and swallowed and nodded. He was right. The ER was always misdiagnosing things. My mom had said that countless times. The specialist got the films on Friday and the office called me explaining they wouldn’t know anything until Monday.
“Hold fast,” the woman said.
I did my best to keep my fear under wraps. I was grateful my kids were away—my son living with a girlfriend and my daughter at college. It was just my husband and me.
Yet there was something off about him, something I recognized—that old distance and preoccupation a man has when he’s fucking around on his wife. It was something I couldn’t deal with now. Not now for Christ’s sake! Not when my fear swirled around my head like a rotten, dark wind. He was in and out of the house, apparently off to Home Depot and Walmart. He returned with flowers. “I figured you could use these,” he said. Then his cell dinged with a message.
“I bet it’s Mark again,” he mumbled, referring to his co-worker who was apparently a screw-up. He looked at his phone. “Yep. Let me run over there.” He ran upstairs, brushed his teeth, and flew out the door, accidently leaving his cell on the kitchen counter.
I knew better than to look at it. I should’ve walked away.
I picked up the phone and swiped the message icon.
There was no text from Mark. It was a text from a Pam. Pam—he hadn’t even bothered to disguise the woman’s name.
I’ll find out soon I think its the Big C, my husband wrote.
That’s awful, Pam had responded.
it is.
what will you do babe?
Babe. Babe. She’d written babe.
move on life is journey.
Pam wrote: I feel so guilty
it sounds like its a fast-moving cancer, so I think it will be quick love you.
She wrote: see you soon baby xoxo.
Then the last text from her, the one that had dinged in front of me and made him run out the door: I’m home now.
I wanted to vomit. I was sick, disgusted with him and disgusted at myself as every memory, every moment of forgiveness I’d given him, every time I’d said in marriage counseling, “We can get through this.” Every moment I forced myself to be happy.
A few hours later, after my husband came home from “dealing with Mark” and went to bed, I found myself angling the knife, slowly bringing it to his jugular. His stupid mask sat on our dresser, the dresser we’d pick out together as newlyweds. My husband had assumed I was going to die, leaving him free and clear to run off with another woman. Who does this?
WHO DOES THIS?
Suddenly I thought of my mom, dying in the hospital bed. She had grabbed my hand. “We’re allowed two major mistakes in life. Remember that.”
She was so weak, so thin, so drained, but she spoke to me with her last breath. “You’ve made mistake one. Mistake number two is happening. Get out before it drives you off the edge.”
Now my husband’s eyes opened. He didn’t move.
it sounds like a fast-moving cancer so i think it will be quick love you.
I’d gotten a call from the doctor after I’d read the vile text messages. The doctor said, “It’s your gallbladder, Katie. Not cancer. That’s the good news.” Then he said the bad news was I’d have to have my gallbladder removed.
Just thinking of it made me press the knife harder against my husband’s skin. Made me think of sweet Jim Marino and his long hair, his flannel underneath his jacket, sitting across from me at the diner all those years ago, shaking his head. “You’re going back to him, aren’t you? You’re choosing the easy way.”
Yes, I’ve lied. Made you believe I was going to kill Jim.
You see, it wasn’t Brian who I’d broken up with. It was Jim. Early that summer so long ago, Brian found that poem Jim had written to me and because I was too afraid to choose Jim, to choose what I assumed would be a dead-end future, I’d chosen Brian. Because that’s what girls like me did! We married men like Brian!
I don’t know why I lied about this part. Maybe I wanted to trick you. Maybe I’m really fucking crazy.
But here is what happened at the end.
“I don’t have the Big C, Brian.” I pressed the knife harder against his neck. “You know, the fast-moving cancer.”
He swallowed, his terrified eyes on me. “That’s good.”
“Is it?” I remember the steel of the butcher knife gleaming. I remember the wind had picked up outside and banged relentlessly against our bedroom walls.
I want to say I walked away. That I walked out of the bedroom and went to the computer and googled a divorce lawyer.
But that’s not what I did. You can see that now.
Instead my fury and passion got the best of me. I slid the gleaming blade against his jugular and sliced clean through.
It was surprisingly easy. Bloody, but easy.