I don’t think she’s showered
in weeks. On the off chance I do bribe her and get her into the bath, she just
sits there, shivering and curling herself into a ball. The only thing she
bothers to put on anymore are oversized sweatshirts, or a t-shirt if it’s a
little warmer out. Her auburn curls are matted and tangled together, all
tightly knotted at the top of her head. Her jade eyes no longer light up at the
sound of music on our record player, which sits next to the couch in the living
room. She refuses to eat, and anything I’m able to coax down her throat just
comes back up. Her body is no longer soft and delicate, it’s become frail and
sharp as each bone becomes more and more prominent. I haven’t seen her smile
since the accident.
“It’s your fault” he tells me. “I’m dead because of you.
You did this to me, and now you should feel incredibly guilty. You’ll never
know peace and happiness again now that I’m gone.” My mind screams at him,
telling him to leave me alone. He appears everywhere, a constant reminder of
what I have done. I’m sorry. No matter how many times I try to explain to him
it was an accident, he won’t leave me alone. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. It
was an accident, I promise. Or was it? I don’t know. He was scaring me and I
was driving and the paternity test results were in his hands and I didn’t see
the patch of black ice in the road. He’s gone but he’s everywhere, even when I
close my eyes.
I can tell nightmares plague
her thoughts when she closes her eyes. I can feel her body tense and her
muscles clench beside me in bed. She tosses and turns, tears often staining her
cheeks. Every time she cries out, I awaken her, but I can tell that to her, the
real world is no safer to her than her own thoughts. Our son still hasn’t
learned to sleep through the night, and even his wails can’t snap her out of
this dark place she’s trapped in.
I hear him crying. It’s faint, and almost far away, but I
can hear it. I try to block him out, to find a silence. His tears and screams
only remind me of what I had done. His eyes and his little nose remind me of
Mark, but tiny dark hairs on his head could only come from Jack.
I can understand why she
might be depressed. The accident had been so awful. She had stayed at the
office late to help her boss finish up a sales pitch they were working on. Her
and Jack often had late nights, so around midnight I tucked our son in, and
went to bed. The call at three woke me and the baby up, its ring piercing the
silence of the night. “On the freeway,” they said, “your wife’s car flipped
over.” I gunned it to the hospital, Mason in the backseat, thinking only
negative thoughts about what had happened. But she was okay. A couple of
stitches in her forehead, a few broken ribs, but other than that she was ok.
Relief hit me like a truck, until I was asked to identify a body; Jack’s.
Apparently his car broke down and she was giving him a ride to the train
station where his wife was going to pick him up.
“That baby is mine and you know it,” he screams. “I have
a paternity test right here, why don’t we have a look at?” Maybe I did mean to
hit the ice. Maybe I wanted him dead. “You know you wanted me dead, I had the
potential to destroy your perfect little life.” Go away. Leave me be please. The
whole thing was a big mistake and it never should have happened. I didn’t love
him, but Mark had been mad at me for a while and I was a little drunk and he
was there and then we were both there, with our clothes on the ground, a set of
despicable, cheating liars. We both deserve to be dead.
She doesn’t deserve anything
that’s happened to her. She is beautiful and kind, a caring mother. When I saw
her sleeping in the hospital, all I could feel was relief that she was ok, that
I never wanted anything to happen to her, that I would protect her forever.
“No one can protect you from yourself. From what you did
to me, and everything we had done. No one will ever want to protect you.”
The doctor’s told me the
possible side effects. She would want to sleep a lot, the pain killers would
make her drowsy. “She might be a little depressed, for a couple weeks,” the
doctors said. But weeks have turned into months now, and she still won’t leave
whatever she’s buried herself in. She refuses the medicine, the sight of any anti-depressant
pill makes her nose scrunch up and go deeper into her shell.
Mark would never forgive me once he knows. No one would
ever forgive me. We both deserve to be dead.
All I want is for her to be
better, to get better. I wish she would take the pills, even just a couple. It
couple help her get better, be happy. She deserves to be happy again, to hold
her child and watch him grow, smiling when he wins a football game, or scolding
him when his report card is not to the standards that she expects him. She
deserves to dance at the sound of our record player in the living room, and to
laugh at her own corny jokes. She deserves to be her old self, the girl everyone
loves, the girl I love.
We both deserve to be dead.
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