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“Are you kidding?” I asked. “I never watch the news.”
“I know,” Jackson said, his face serious as he prepared his equipment. “And I’m starting to think you should.”
I gave him a side eye as I made myself comfortable and pressed play.
Jackson worked on my tattoo, filling the outline with orange and yellow shading, creating the phoenix’s vibrant plumes.
The first video was about a husband who’d killed his wife in a murder suicide. Their names were Craig and Tina, and my stomach lurched when I saw Tina lying in a hospital bed, covered in bruises.
Jackson wasn’t looking at me — he was focusing on filling in the phoenix’s wing.
“I’m not sure I want to see this,” I said, and closed the app. “The hoarders were less depressing.”
“I don’t think you’re aware of how dangerous Nathan might be,” Jackson said. “These are real women, being murdered by their partners and ex-partners.”
I swallowed my discomfort and forced myself to watch the next video. In this one, the husband had shot his wife and children while they were sleeping, before traveling hundreds of miles to show up at the house of a girlfriend he’d met on the internet.
I barely felt the needle as it traveled over my skin. The details on the screen were so gruesome they took up all my attention — bloodstained sheets, police markers on the carpet, receipts for duct tape and bleach.
Some of the victims were shot. Others were suffocated while they slept. Some were strangled. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves, left on the side of the road, or dissolved in acid. Some were never found.
In one high-profile case, an estranged husband doused his wife’s car with petrol while she was taking her kids to school and set it alight. All five of them died.
The most disturbing thing was that these relationships looked normal from the outside, but featured the same personality traits that I’d seen in Nathan: a controlling, insecure husband or boyfriend, and a woman who’d started telling family and friends that she was scared of him. A woman who’d left or was about to leave.
The perpetrators were overwhelmingly — but not always — men. Their victims were often not only the wife who they felt had wronged them, but their children, too. Two- and three-year-old smiling toddlers whose only crime was having their mother’s DNA.
The perpetrator, if the attack wasn’t a murder suicide, seemed to have a shocking lack of remorse or sorrow. He sat in police interrogation rooms and courthouses with a stony look on his face, answering questions so calmly that he might have been in a job interview.
In every case, there were always people who, when interviewed by the media, disclosed that they felt that something wasn’t quite right: the victim had often tried to downplay the abuse, she’d tried to keep her family together and smooth out the conflict, but there were signs. Husbands who controlled where their wives went, who they saw, and how they dressed. Jealousy and insecurity that eventually manifested as irrational anger.
The more I watched these videos, the more paralyzed I felt.
I remembered how Nathan cleared out my closet and became irrational when I went out with friends.
“I get it,” I said, after seeing an article about a man who threw his wife down a flight of stairs. “Can I watch something else now?”
“Keep watching,” Jackson said.
Another video started, an older one, with grainy film and a newsreader with a coiffed hairstyle, and I frowned. It was similar to the others — setting the scene of a family who looked happy in photos but had troubling warning signs behind the scenes.
What got my attention was that the woman seemedfamiliarsomehow. I was sure I didn’t know her, but I’d seen her face before. I shrugged it off as the video detailed text messages she sent to her friends, who I also didn’t recognize.
Maybe she just had one of those familiar-looking faces.
Her hair was dark brown, her eyes were green, her skin was lightly tanned and while her clothes covered most of her body, in some pictures, I could see that she had tattoos on both wrists. Her two kids were adorable, and the video showed photos of them in a baby animal enclosure, feeding goats and wallabies by hand.
The woman’s face flashed up again, filling the screen as the narrator described her life, and this time, Jackson flinched. Luckily, the needle wasn’t on my skin — he’d switched it off to watch the video with me.
“Do you know her?” I asked, as he busied himself with wiping the excess ink from my skin.
“Yes,” he said.
“Who is she?” I asked, wondering how she looked so familiar, when the video said she and her husband lived in another state.
“Imagine her with a beard,” Jackson said, and when that made me more confused, he lowered his voice.
“Don’t tell Xavier I told you this. That’s his sister.”
