Dear Wife(80)

Sabine was stacking leftover cookies into a plastic container when I came into the kitchen. She saw me, and she sucked in a breath. “What are you doing here? Is everything okay? Omigod, don’t move. And get away from that window.”

She shooed me out of sight and rushed past, her heels clicking on the marble. I heard the metallic clunk of the front door lock sliding into place, and two seconds later, she was back. She looked me over for cuts and bruises.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“Only my ribs,” I say, cradling my right side with a palm, “but nothing’s broken.”

Anyone else would have asked how I knew, but not Sabine. Sabine knew what you did to me. All those times you threw me down the stairs, the punches and the kicks and the bites, the concussions and broken ribs. She knew what you were capable of, and she helped me anyway.

Do you even remember meeting her? I bet you don’t, do you? Sabine was the broker on that house on Hillcroft Street, the one we looked at last year. It was more house than we could afford, but you wanted it, and I knew better than to point out the obvious. The mortgage bank did it for me, two weeks later. When they turned us down, you got so mad you kicked me in the head.

But you probably don’t remember Sabine because you were so busy strutting around the house, taking in the twelve-foot ceilings and granite countertops, the kitchen filled with shiny appliances we’d never use. But I noticed. I noticed the way her smile was too big but her eyes were sad, the way her makeup was thicker on one side, the way she kept touching her cheek like she had a toothache.

She’s like me, I remember thinking. Her husband is like mine.

And so, while you were up in the attic, banging on the rafters and inspecting the wiring, I asked if she was okay.

“I’m fine,” she said, but her eyes didn’t quite meet mine and she smiled way too bright, the way I did when people asked me. “Honestly, I’m fine.”

I could hear your footsteps overhead, stomping around up there in self-importance even though you didn’t have the slightest clue what you were looking at, and I knew I didn’t have much time.

I wrapped my hand around her wrist and whispered, “My husband does it, too.” Sabine’s eyes went wide with understanding, with acknowledgment. “He hurts me, too.”

Swear to God, I don’t even know why I said it. Up till then I hadn’t said those words to a single soul, not even to my sister, but that day the words just came right out. Finally, I’d dared to push open that heavy metal door that I thought was protecting me and told someone our dirty little secret. My knees went wobbly with relief.

It was months before I ran into her again, in the shampoo aisle at the drugstore. She told me her husband had become a new man. Bringing her coffee in the mornings, tucking sweet notes in her work bag, calling her just because. He was trying so hard, she said around a stiff, synthetic smile, and my blood turned to ice and my fingers tingled. I looked at Sabine and I saw me, all those years ago. Before I understood that a backhand was the beginning, not the end, of a cycle.

I took her hand, squeezed it until the bones slid under her skin. “This is what they do, Sabine. They create perfect, perfectly happy moments so that when the bad ones come again, and they will, we will remember those perfect moments and stay.”

The understanding that crept up her face was identical to the one that was blooming in my chest. No woman wants to admit their marriage is over. We want to keep loving the person we once loved. We want the dream, the fairy tale of forever and ever after. To leave is to admit defeat.

But it was that moment in the drugstore, warning a stranger off going down my path, when I knew I had to do the same. I needed to get off this path, too. I needed to break this cycle of tenderness and brutality. Even if parts of me got broken in the process.

Sabine is the one who helped me come up with a plan—to skim off the grocery money, to make you think I’ve gone one way and then go another, to change my name and my hair, to hide in plain sight. She started volunteering at shelters, both for herself and for me. She interviewed the women there, researched what worked and what got women killed. She was like a graduate student with a thesis, single-minded and thorough.

She fed her findings to me in bite-size chunks—in the locker room at the gym, at the water fountains at the park, in whispers while pumping our gas. We never chose the same place twice, and we never put anything in writing.

We were so careful, and yet you found her anyway.

But that day at the open house, I came to say goodbye.

“You’re leaving? You’re really going through with it?” Her eyes widened like they did when she first saw me, only this time not with surprise but with pride. As much as she encouraged me to leave you, as many times as she told me I could, I think a bigger part of her never thought I’d do it. I’d been with you for so long, she didn’t think that I dared.

I nodded. “I am.”

“Do you know where you’re going?”

I nodded again. Tulsa, then a roundabout route to Atlanta, but I kept that part to myself. Sabine wouldn’t want to know, and I wouldn’t want to tell her. She already knew too much.

“And what about his friends? Those cops you thought might be watching you. How do you know they won’t follow?”

“I don’t. But the whole department is at a training in Little Rock today. Anger management, if you can believe the irony. Anyway, they’re all there until four. If you’ve ever thought of robbing a bank, today would be a good day to do it.”