My Husband Came Closer to Suicide than I Did

Abuse hurts the abuser, too.

June 2019

Our room is quiet, the curtains pulled against the bright summer sun, and the air in here is still. In the middle of a summer day, when the boys are upstairs playing calmly and the girls are asleep, it is like the house is taking a break, holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.

I have a love-hate relationship with our bed. It sits high off the ground on a frame that Atlas built when we moved in, held up by four cedar posts that he cut, stripped, and nailed to the frame raw. I picked out the red sheets.

This bed has been my haven when I was recovering from childbirth and when I was sick; and it has been my prison when I was leaned over it unwillingly, when I was ripped out of it and dropped to the floor, when I laid on my back and gritted my teeth until it was over, night after night.

There isn’t much to clean up in here, just a few dirty clothes that I toss in the hamper and the remnants of last night’s snack to throw away. I haven’t swept in a while, though; I grab the broom from the kitchen and sneak back into the bedroom, quietly so I don’t wake the girls.

It is the rug that is strange. It’s a little blue rug, one that we bought a few months ago to liven up our bare floors. Sometimes, it clashes with my red sheets; sometimes, it feels like they complement each other. Today they go together just right.

But Atlas moved the rug. It has sat there, right beside his side of the bed, for the last few weeks. It occurs to me that I probably hadn’t swept there when he moved the rug, and he almost certainly didn’t.

I lean the broom against the bed and pull the rug out of the way.

Nearly two years later, the Alien will ask me how close I came to suicide when I was with his brother. “I watched it from across the room and considered it as an option,” will be my answer.

But now, in the deepest, darkest, most constricting part of the Singularity, I still don’t want to die. It’s an option, surely. I can see a future of endless degradation ahead of me, endless gaslighting, endless nights of being fucked by an uncaring penis, night after night after night with no letup, and that scenario makes me want to die.

I think of the women in days not too far past, for whom divorce was not an option; I think of the women in countries today where divorce is not an option, and I know that there would be no point in living if this was all there was for me.

I don’t even have to think about it to know that poison is the way I would go.

Five years, I think to myself, if I can make it until Baby Li is old enough to go to public school then I will be able to leave. I can endure this for five more years. Then I will have a life that is worth living.

The day before I will finally leave Atlas, in October, I will see those five years stretching out before me and I will know that those, too, are unbearable. He will kill me before then if I don’t do it myself.

The rug slides away with ease. And they catch my eye with a glaring fragility, those holes in the floor — four of them, punched through the hardwood at an angle, randomly dispersed but all within about a foot of one another.

I breathe in sharply as I realize what they are.

I move over to stand between the holes and Atlas’ side of the bed; I can see it playing out in my head as I mimic the movements.

He stands at the edge of the bed, just stands there, looking at his gun. The thoughts whirl around in his head, gnashing their teeth at him, ripping apart his insides. Just do it, bitch, those thoughts hiss at him, if she isn’t here then you are alone with yourself and you can’t stand that. She has run away from you like you wish you could run away from yourself, but you are always here. This is the only thing you can do to get away from the miserable, worthless, cock-sucking piece of shit that you are. The Wolf was right, you deserve to be shot.

He looks down at the gun in his hands; then with a sudden resolve, he snaps the safety off and holds the barrel up to his head. Do it, they whisper, slurring, sinister, raising his body temperature and somehow filling his ears even as they get quieter, do it. The boys are playing quietly upstairs, the girls are sleeping in their room across the hall, uneasy, not knowing where their mother has gone.

Do it.

With a roar, he points his 9mm Walther at the floor and fires until the clip is empty.

He drops the gun on the floor, breathing hard, shaking, and collapses onto the bed. Not today.

I feel numb, physically and emotionally. He had told me, when I got back from my hitchhiking excursion to the Wolf’s house, that he had held a gun to his head and then fired it at the ground while I was gone. I had expressed concern at the time, of course, like a good wife should do; but it isn’t until now, seeing those bullet holes in my home, running my fingers over the little bit of nothingness where floor should be, that the reality of what he almost did hits me.

He is terrified to be alone with himself. I can’t, even now, say with any certainty what those dark places within him look like, but I know they are darker than the ones inside me. He cannot sleep at night without someone next to him to keep his demons away.

All the things he has done to me — all the things he has taken from me — he can see it. He knows what he is doing, I can tell from the look in his eyes just before that animalistic darkness consumes him, just before he loses touch with that thing inside him that makes him human. He knows that he is hurting me, he knows that he is taking my freedom, my endorphins, my sanity.

He just doesn’t know how to do anything different.

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