SUNDAY MORNING
It was a strange, unexpected thought as I glanced over at the man I had married, wondering how the ugliest of hearts could be wrapped in the most beautiful skin. The down comforter was tucked up under his chin, hiding his lithe body that required no effort whatsoever to maintain. Sometimes I joked that I despised him for it – eating anything he wanted without gaining an inch on his waistline. If I even looked at dessert, I gained two pounds. Sometimes I wasn’t joking when I said I hated him.
It wasn’t that I hated him, not exactly. Years of togetherness had given me so much, but now he had taken too much. For so long I had just followed him blindly, until he led us both off the ledge. I needed to find my way back, and I couldn’t do that with him anymore.
For years he had been my rock … tied to my ankles.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, and I meant it.
Once upon a time we had loved each other deeply. It showed in the way he carried me over the threshold when we had first bought this house. Or when we took our first vacation together to Asheville, North Carolina, where we toured the Biltmore House and oohed and aahed over the thousands of tulips blooming in the gardens. Or the first time we made love, on a bed of rose petals as he sucked the tender spot on my neck and caressed my thigh longingly. Those memories had been so pure and good. But now only painful memories remained. Like chess pieces, the bad had knocked all the good off the board.
All I could remember right now was the way he hurt me. The way he betrayed me. The way he lied.
A moonbeam cast a silvery stripe across the bed. He slept soundly beneath covers that were charcoal like the sky, unaware of me standing over him, and I regretted what I was about to do. I wondered if he had any unspoken regrets. I had a mouthful of them. I had spent the best years of my life loving this human being more than anything else, deeply and passionately with a forbidden desire I couldn’t quench. Only now did I realize it had never been love, but obsession – an obsession with stability, with security. I needed him, but he had never needed me back.
We had been wrong from the beginning, I knew this, but I let him consume me regardless. Nothing could stop me, not even myself. Not even all the red flags.
The mystery of love – yes, it had enthralled me, and now here we were, lost in its unanswerable riddle. I still couldn’t figure it out, why I had ever loved a monster. Some days he felt like a warm rain, but recently he had become a torrent sweeping me out to a stormy sea, drowning me.
Now here I stood over him, wrapped in Sunday morning nostalgia, watching him sleeping in the Ethan Allen four-poster bed we shared, controlling my breath as I whispered my goodbyes. I reminisced about the idyllic weekends of long ago. Pure heaven – the scent of French roast coffee wafting to our bedroom, the humming stillness of the house, two lovers pretzeled together beneath mulberry silk sheets, our bodies sweat-glazed from creative and energetic sex.
Now that was laughable, really. His touch burned me, his lips disgusted me. Not because of time’s toll on our bodies – gravity works extra hard after age forty, you know. It wasn’t that. It was the slow rot of who he used to be. Once upon a time we cuddled like two toothbrushes in a cup, the length of our bodies resting on one another. I wished I could reach that man today, right now, but I knew he was long gone.
I thought about the apology flowers he had just bought me, how his face lit up as he handed them to me. How I tenderly placed them in a vase, admiring his thoughtfulness for a moment. That moment had dried up with the crisp petals currently scattered along the coffee table. Wilted, dead flowers – they were my marriage’s final curtain call, but they weren’t enough. Not to save us. Not to save him.
‘Remember when we first got married and lived in that tiny apartment in the basement of Cat Lady’s house?’ The whispered question was more for myself than for him. I didn’t want to risk waking him. I shook the memory loose.
Cat Lady was the nickname we gave the white-haired woman who rented out her basement to us. We could never remember her actual name – it was Slavic, with too many syllables for our all-American tongues to pronounce – but she had at least a dozen cats that we counted the only time she let us into the first floor of the house. The ammonia stench took our breath away; it was a wonder the waterfalls of cat piss didn’t leak through the floorboards into the ceiling of our apartment below. Life had been so full of adventure and hope back then.
‘We used to snuggle up on that ratty old sofa we found on the curb, talking about our plans for the future.’ I smiled at the memory. Reaching out a finger, I touched his stubbly cheek and recoiled in distaste.
I would never forget when the mouse came crawling out of the sofa cushion and darted across my leg. I was pretty sure the whole neighborhood heard me scream. The most baffling part about it was how the mouse had managed to slip by a dozen cats. I chuckled softly, then wiped a tear that dripped down my cheek.
The Simple Days, I called them. Back then, when life made sense and I knew who I was, where I was going. These days I aimlessly trudged through the mire of one moment to the next.
I couldn’t resurrect The Simple Days, though, could I? They were too far gone. Some things just aren’t meant to last, no matter how many stars we naïvely wish upon.
My eyes traveled down his sleeping body – his brawny arms hugging his pillow like it was an illicit lover, his long legs sprawling under the covers. Asleep, his face looked so sweet and boyish, incapable of uttering a harsh word or criticism. Of course, I knew that was only an illusion. In the mad rush of days filled with housekeeping and packing school lunches and folding laundry and prepping dinner, I rarely saw the softer side of him anymore. We rarely saw each other at all.
The barking of the next-door neighbor’s dog prodded me with sudden urgency. Before long the street would erupt in the commotion of families rushing off to church or Sunday breakfast. I needed to make this quick, get it over with before I talked myself out of it. Or before he woke up. It was time.
There’s no better time than the present, my mother often said. Even when it didn’t relate to anything pertinent, she loved using that tired old cliché. I was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, hadn’t bothered to slip into pajamas when I snuck back in this morning. Pajamas wouldn’t fit with the story I had already planned out. I could feel daybreak approaching. While early risers all across my suburban neighborhood held steaming mugs of coffee, I held the knife I’d slid out of the butcher block minutes ago. My hand trembled as I lifted the blade and sucked in a steadying breath.
Lightly moving the covers aside, I took one last long, lingering look at the man I was about to kill. The man I had sworn to love and cherish until death do us part. And yet I had kept my vow, hadn’t I? On the count of three I would forever alter my future – giving myself the freedom I needed, the sole choice I had never been given to control my own life.
One.
Two.
Three.
I pressed the blade lengthways against his throat. I closed my eyes and turned my head. His flesh resisted. But not for long. While across the neighborhood wives kissed their husbands good morning, I planted Death’s kiss on mine.