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But there’s no water in that well.
About two months after her mother-in-law’s death, her husband focused somewhere above her shoulder and said, “I know you can have a hard time—responding—to my dad. Was there something you did? Something you maybe said that set him off?”
His words branched inside her in an endless fractal root system, nearly impossible to pull out once planted.
“What could, what could I have done? Done to deserve that?” she stammered.
“Right. You’re right. But—maybe?”
She burst into tears, and he apologized. But her husband had granted his father the benefit of the doubt, had elevated pleasing him above her safety. Even as her thoughts reeled in the spin of this betrayal, she understood that she blamed herself, too. Blamed herself in a way she could never explain to her husband because if she did, it would cut in a way irreparable.
You saw your father-in-law for who he is a long time ago. You let him into your life anyway. And what happened? Exactly what you always thought might happen. So it is your fault. It is.
Blaming herself imposed a reassuring cause and effect, a sense that she had power to prevent further violence. She told her husband she wouldn’t ever speak to her father-in-law again. That the children weren’t allowed to see him.
Maybe that satisfying sense of control was why, hunted in the cold darkness behind the walls of her own home, what rattled in her mind under every other thought, every motion, frantic as a rodent in a trap was a search for how she might somehow be at fault for all of this. That there was something she had done, or should have done, or should still do that she couldn’t quite yet pinpoint, some way to bring it all into focus that would allow her to prevent harm.
What did you do? Why is this happening? Why is this happening to you?
What next? Whatnext?
9
You can’t stay in here forever. Will he leave? How can you know if he does?
In spite of the cold, the discomfort of the hard floor, in spite of her muscle-tightening fear, an immense weight pulled at her eyelids.
Coming down off the adrenaline, or else maybe you shouldn’t be lying down at all with that egg on your forehead.
She sat up. The blood drained from her vibrating skull. After a moment’s intense sureness she was going to vomit, she felt slightly better.
No, shouldn’t be lying down like that with your head hurt.
She tucked her legs into her robe to warm them. Her child-kicked, newly bruised breast ached in a way that made her wonder as she always did with the children’s accidental hurts how someone so small could inflict such pain. Made her remember the misery of breastfeeding, the swollen bite of mastitis. She leaned against the bricks of the chimney, causing grit to slough down her back.
When she closed her eyes, her exhausted mind distilled all her internal criticism into her husband’s voice, his tone the same as when he’d asked, “Was there something you did?”
“You should’ve just gone downstairs,” this voice said, “pretended to be asleep on the couch, left the children sleeping. Maybe thenhe’d have thought no one saw him, and would just take your things. Leave you alone.”
But you know what he wants. Or maybe wants. No! No maybe. He’s said it now. You heard him. He came here because he thinks he deserves whatever, whoever, he wants.
“You should’ve run down the stairs right away, run for the car keys while he was in your room, driven away, gotten help.”
But the snow. Remember last year, the time we couldn’t even pull out the cars, had to wait for the plow? If you got stuck, what then? Him dragging you by the hair, screaming, back into the house.
She thought of that unidentifiable weapon and flinched, recalling the sound as he’d hit the heavy weight of it against his palm.
“An excuse for everything,” her husband’s phantom voice echoed, exasperated. “When, really, you’re just too scared, too frightened of the world to do things right. To think. Think about it!”
If he drove here, his car could be blocking the garage.
She imagined a car slowly rolling up the driveway as they slept. She pictured him waiting outside in the darkness, seeing them indoors, vulnerable, unknowing. Little players lit up on a stage through the windows. A wild thing invisible as he circled the campfire that blinded them.
“Are yousureyou locked the doors?” her husband asked.
I—don’t remember exactly? But I always lock the doors. You’re the one who forgets. Who doesn’t even think it’s necessary. You’re the one who always thinks we’re safe, that I’m overreacting. Paranoid.
“You are paranoid.”
