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And then I ran to the bathroom and stuck my finger down my throat until I was choking up the pills. I counted, only breathing out in relief when I saw all five of them floating in the toilet.
I sat back on the cool tile as I flushed. Not for long, though. I got up and brushed my teeth. I was sure the enamel on my teeth was getting worn by this morning routine, but I didn’t see any other way. Besides, it was a short-term fix. I’d only been doing it for eight months.
The withdrawal was a bitch, that was for damn sure.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Slim. Long blonde hair. Under thirty. The trophiest of trophy wives.
As long as you didn’t look too closely at my wrists and the scars from the deep slashes there. Bruises could be hidden with concealer, but scars were more difficult. I wondered if any of our so-called “friends” ever wondered why I always wore long sleeves or else a watch and heavy bangles on my wrists, no matter the occasion. Then again, they didn’t need to wonder. Jeff told anyone who would listen that I’d tried to kill myself. It fit well into the narrative he painted of me as mentally unstable and “fragile.”
I’d been on the cocktail of pills ever since I’d made the attempt to exit this shit life six years ago. During the withdrawals last fall, I couldn’t say I wasn’t tempted to take the shortcut again. Jeff had finally allowed me to be around sharps again after year two out from The Incident. So I had access. I could have done it.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d been planning the first day I threw up the pills after drinking just enough water to swallow them past my uvula and get them lodged in my throat. Well, the first time had been accident, but the day after it had been on purpose.
Before that, I hadn’t felt much of anything at all for… years. I mean I still felt the pain when Jeff hit me. A slap was a slap and a broken bone was a broken bone, and it hurt. He never let me get numb enough not to feel the pain. What fun would that have been?
But the pills let me drift, pull apart from my body. It let the weeks drift into one another, and then become months, and then years were passing.
I was the broken, cowed thing Jeff had wanted from the beginning, and he reigned over me as Lord of the Manor.
And then one day, I stood at the kitchen doing dishes from breakfast and looking out the window, and there was a hummingbird buzzing around the tree that had just flowered outside.
I stopped, hands in the soapy water, and I watched it. It was beautiful, glorious, with wings flapping so fast I couldn’t see anything but a blur as it moved from flower to flower. It had this amazing, iridescent breast of feathers. I was absolutely mesmerized.
I don’t know how long I watched it… Before, all of the sudden, it zoomed straight into the window I was watching through with a loud thump.
I jumped and let out a little screech, horrified. And then I ran outside when I didn’t see it fly back off again.
Only to find the back end of the bird sticking out the mouth of a neighborhood cat at the foot of my kitchen window.
“No!” I’d cried uselessly as the cat ran away with its catch.
I’d felt sick, and hurried back into the house, and I’d thrown up my breakfast.
And seen the pills I’d swallowed not fifteen minutes before. Some were half-digested, others were still in their bright capsule casings.
And it all felt so horrifying. What had happened to the bright bird. How quickly it went from flying free and glorious to becoming prey.
Jeff liked to talk about prey. He had a theory he liked to espouse that the world was full of predators and prey. He was a lawyer, a defense attorney, and he liked to think of himself as a predator who conquered the foolish and weak.
That he considered me one of the foolish and weak prey was a fact we both took for granted in this metaphor. He often talked about women as the weaker sex. When he was in a generous mood, he’d tell me patronizingly that it was good I had someone like him on my side, or else the world would eat me alive.
As if he hadn’t been that cat waiting to devour me whole the moment I was vulnerable and stumbled across his path all those years ago.
The next morning, I’d shoved my fingers down my throat the moment he’d left for work, and every morning since.
Hurrying from the bathroom into the bedroom, I donned my gardening clothes and then I went into the backyard, grabbing my best hoe from the shed as I went.
It was raining and I was quickly soaked but I didn’t care. I was operating on autopilot. If I thought too much about what I was doing, I might not have the nerve. And nerve was the only thing that was going to get me through this.
I’d almost gone twice last week. It had been sunny. There was no reason I shouldn’t have done it then.
Except for the fact that I wimped out. Jeff had been in a good mood and I… I don’t know what the hell I thought. But then one day, he came home and found me scrubbing the floorboards.
No wife of his should ever be on her knees. Except when he put me there, apparently, because the next thing he’d done was give me a swift kick in the back of my ribs.
Like I was a dog.
It hadn’t escalated.
