Mark, for his part, oscillated between apology and accusation with the speed of a metronome. First came flowers delivered to my porch with a note that read I never meant to hurt you, I was overwhelmed. Then came texts to Emily from new numbers after Denise helped her change the old one: I’m in therapy, please talk to me, I can explain, you know my parents poison everything. Then, when no answer came, the tone changed. You’re ruining my life. You made me look like a monster. If you cared about me at all, you would stop this. Emily deleted them with increasing steadiness. The first few left her shaking. By the tenth she just handed me the phone and said, “Another one.”
People who have not lived near abuse often imagine leaving as a clean break, a dramatic door slam and then freedom. They do not understand that abuse trains the mind to keep the abuser alive inside it even after the body is gone. Mark remained in the house for weeks as a phantom of expectation. Emily asked permission before taking a shower longer than ten minutes. She folded towels three times because “Mark hated crooked stacks.” She apologized when she laughed too loudly at something on television. She refused to lock the bathroom door until one afternoon I noticed and said, trying to sound casual, “You know you can lock that if you want.” She went still and then whispered, “He said locked doors were secretive.” After that I replaced every flimsy interior latch in the house with ones that turned smoothly from inside, and when she noticed she cried over hardware.
Nights were worst. The old house creaked in weather. Pipes knocked. The icemaker dropped cubes with gunshot authority. Emily had nightmares three or four times a week. Sometimes I heard her cry out and went to her room to find her sitting bolt upright, drenched in sweat, staring at nothing. Sometimes she was ashamed to have woken me. Sometimes she needed to talk and sometimes she needed me to sit in silence until her breathing came back. Once, near three in the morning, she said, “I think I’m mourning someone who never existed.”
“Mark?”
She nodded.
I sat in the chair by her window and listened to the wind outside worry the maple branches. “That’s real mourning,” I said. “You’re not stupid for grieving the version you were promised.”
“I keep remembering good things and then feeling guilty.” Her voice was barely above the whisper of the room heater. “Like the way he made me soup when I had the flu. The road trip to Asheville. The time he stayed up all night helping me reorganize my books by century, which was ridiculous and sweet and nobody else would have done that.”
“Kindness does not erase cruelty,” I said. “Cruelty does not erase kindness either. That’s what makes it so confusing.”
She turned that over in the dark. “I wish he had been awful all the time.”
“I know.”
“Then I would have left sooner.”
