Salsa Dancing On the Beach, Margaritas Nearby, Never Happened

Last-minute changes are common with psychopaths.

My husband had a knack for canceling, altering, or shortening every vacation we took. Today I thought about the year almost two decades ago when he gave me free rein to choose where we went for our week using our timeshare. Planning is half the fun, and I had fantasized about us dancing on a beach, me in a red dress, margaritas abandoned at our table, and musicians playing live salsa nearby. Mazatlan looked pleasing from the vacation recommendations I had visited online; I’d never given Mexico much of a chance, and now I was excited.

Not A Nice Surprise

At the last minute, he had come up with another essential business excuse for changing our tickets, shortening the trip by two days. I felt sick on the evening of the Olympics Opening Ceremony in Greece. The music and representations of relationships between countries upset me a great deal.

I couldn’t stand watching for unknown reasons, and my gut told me something was desperately wrong with our relationship. An awful feeling overcame me that he was with someone else at the very moment I was watching the ceremony alone, and that feeling became more common daily.

I’d spent our vacation reading, watching the Olympics, and wishing I were somewhere else. He was sick and spent most of his time in bed. The timeshare was clean and well taken care of, but its immediate surroundings were one-room hovels with dirt floors and windows that never held any glass.

Dumpsters were alive with critters of every size and type. Narrow roads led to tiny, overcrowded, dusty shops overstuffed with a little bit of everything. I remember thinking that the area looked the way our lives must look to outsiders, inside out. Beautiful on the outside, horrifying inside, only in reverse in this city.

I was living a nightmare, pretending everything was fine when all was in ruin. I’d been shocked and disturbed the entire ride from the Airport to the behemoth compound of American wealth that displayed itself glaringly amid abject poverty. Both saddened and sickened, I felt deflated.

I planned to spend all our time with the locals, making new friends, trying exciting foods I’d never imagined, and learning new things. But we’d been warned not to leave the Timeshare property because it was dangerous, and there was nowhere to go, nothing to do; it was essentially residential and a few shops.

There was one little restaurant nearby, and I’d drug my husband and our baby there for lunch one day. I was embarrassed and ashamed that I’d been duped; we were stuck at a place catered to Americans. I wondered why anyone would bother to leave home to stay at a pathetic replica of the same place dropped in the middle of an impoverished community.

The beaches were too filled with plant life and rocks to visit and were inaccessible to tourists, so we had the pools at our timeshare. Everything was designed to keep us trapped onsite. Clever marketing.

At home, I had panic attacks that made me believe I would die in the middle of the night. I had insomnia and hoped that he cared enough to see that when I was unable to sleep, I needed more from him than a dismissive nod. Unbeknownst to me back then, a soulless individual such as my psychopathic husband didn’t think that way and didn’t care what was happening to me.

One evening a hot breeze carried the aroma from sunscreen on my warm skin to my nostrils, and I relaxed, if only for a few moments. The view from our balcony, overlooking the ocean, high off the ground, sun setting, would’ve been pleasant if I’d been there with someone else. I realized the only thing missing from that vacation was a decent husband.

After that vacation

I was at the park with my kids while my husband re-tiled our bathroom. He had re-floored, painted, and re-designed the entire house. I plopped down on our couch when I walked through the door, and soon my husband burst through the door, arms overflowing with wine and food.

Tiny lights he’d hung around our back patio seemed to float as dusk encroached, and our three-tier fountain could be heard behind us, providing an atmosphere comparable to a beachside restaurant. He’d relayed the “furniture story” to my children that he had shared with me before.

“One time, a friend of mine bought a multi-million-dollar home in Hillsborough. A bunch of us filled the entire house with all this filthy old furniture from a bunch of apartments where I had evicted people. He was so shocked when he went in; he never knew who did it.”

My kids had found his story amusing, and I’d smiled to appease him. Confident that the story was one he’d found on the internet, read in a book, or saw in a movie, I’d felt both sorry for his pathetic ways and angry for his lies.

Another promised adventure

My husband had detailed an adventure that he’d been thinking about recently.

“We can buy a camper and take the kids traveling for six months.”

“Um, I have a court-ordered visitation arrangement now with my ex-husband for my older two kids. Besides, we can’t just take them out of school for six months.” Momentarily, I’d wondered about his mental stability.

“I know that, Joy. I hate it when you act like you know better than I. I’ve already thought that through. You forget who you’re with, and I don’t appreciate it.”

Silence followed as language had been swiped from my brain. He’d bulldozed. “We can get them tutors. Traveling to unique environments is far more educational than sitting in a classroom. You know that. And your ex won’t mind; if he knows he gets out of seeing them, I’m sure he’ll be happy.”

An image of the cartoon The Wild Thornberrys, which my kids loved, had popped into my head, and the characters morphed into our family. The conversation continued, and he instructed me to research different locales around the world that I felt would be appropriate or I might like. I’d pictured us in the mountains, jungles, on islands. The images he’d conjured up in my mind were far more enjoyable than the reality of how we’d lived. At the time, I wondered if we’d yet reached a hundred diversionary tactics.

The next morning my husband had left early and returned with donuts, which, of course, had made me feel uneasy, with a near-perfect knowledge that he’d only left so he could give some woman a warm and loving “wake-up call.” He’d played basketball with my son, rollerbladed through the cul-de-sac with the kids, and half the neighborhood had been outside on that beautiful summer evening.

Over the next few days, he’d finished the master bath and began cutting crown molding for every doorway throughout the house. He’d always thought that doing all these “wonderful” things made up for the only thing I ever asked for; honesty. I knew because he’d told me, far too often, that I was unappreciative and that what he did was more than enough.

What Happened Instead