It was an accident. That’s what you have to understand. I never meant for it to happen.
I didn’t hate you. I didn’t love you, but I didn’t hate you, either, and I don’t think you hated me. I think we were young and I was pregnant, and we did what our parents expected us to do, and then we were stuck with each other, like a lot of people in relationships.
It’s taken a while for me to understand that.
For all of our marriage I was either drinking, or recovering from drinking, or thinking about drinking. Rarely enough to be drunk; rarely so little as to be sober. On and on, for so many years that no one who had never seen me sober would ever know that I wasn’t.
I blamed you for cutting short my freedom, never seeing that what I had in London wasn’t freedom at all. It was just as much a cage, in its own way, as marriage was: a never-ending cycle of working, boozing, clubbing, looking for a one-night stand, slipping away in the early hours.
I thought you trapped me. I never realized you were actually saving me.
I fought it. And I went on fighting it for twenty-five years.
On the night you died I was halfway down a bottle of wine, with three G&Ts under my belt. With Anna away I didn’t have to hide anything—I’d long since stopped pretending in front of you.
Not that I’d ever have admitted I had a problem. They say that’s the first step. I hadn’t taken it—not then. Not till afterward.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” You’d had a drink, too. Otherwise you’d never have dared. We were in the kitchen, Rita curled up in her bed. The house felt empty without Anna, and I knew I was drinking more because of it. Not just because I could, but because it felt strange. Unbalanced. The way it did when she was at university. Then, I had a glimpse of how life would be when she moved out for good, and I didn’t like it. Our marriage was built around our daughter; who were we without her? The thought unsettled me.
“Actually, I think I’ll have another one.” I didn’t even want it. I poured the rest of the wine into a glass meant to be more empty than full. I held the empty bottle upside down by its neck. Taunting you. “Cheers.” A dribble of red wine ran down my sleeve.
You looked at me like you were seeing me for the first time. Shook your head, as if I’d asked you a question. “I can’t do this anymore, Caroline.”
I don’t think you’d planned it. It was just one of those things you say. But I asked what you meant, and it made you think, and I saw the moment the decision made itself in your mind. The decisive nod, the firmness in your lips. Yes, you were thinking, this is what I want. This is what’s going to happen.
“I don’t want to be married to you anymore.”
As I said: my trigger is alcohol.
I was drunk the first time I hit you, and I was drunk the last time. It’s not an excuse—it’s a reason. Did it make a difference to you that I was sorry afterward? Did you know that I meant what I said, that each time I vowed to myself it would be the last? Sometimes the apologies came late; sometimes they came right away, when the sudden release of pent-up anger sobered me as surely as if I’d slept it off.
When the police came, you lied with me. Nothing to see here. After the 999 calls, we said it was a mistake. A child messing with the phone.
You stopped saying you forgave me. You stopped saying anything at all; just pretended it hadn’t happened. When I hurled Anna’s clay paperweight at you, and it ricocheted off you and broke against the wall, you picked up the pieces and glued them back together. And you let Anna think you’d broken it.
“She loves you,” you said. “I can’t bear to think of her knowing the truth.”
That should have stopped me. It didn’t.
If I hadn’t been drinking that last night, I might have gotten upset rather than angry. I might even have nodded, thought: You’re right—this isn’t working. I might have realized that neither of us was happy, and maybe it was time to call it quits.
I didn’t do that.
Before the words were even out of your mouth, my arm was moving. Hard. Fast. Unthinking. The bottle smashed against your head.
I stood in the kitchen, the neck of the bottle still in my hand, and a carpet of green glass at my feet. And you. Lying on your side. A glossy pool of blood beneath your head, from where you’d hit the marble worktop on your way to meet the tiles.
Dead.