“Babble to me,” I request. “Tell me about you, your job, your family, love life, the rest of our friends. Go.”
“Okay, but first, you need to take care of those raccoon eyes.” She passes me a Kleenex and it makes me laugh. Loud.
I can’t remember the last time I laughed loud.
Our eyes meet and she’s not laughing.
***
As it turns out, an airline will apparently not tell you if someone boarded their flight. Even if you sit there for two hours after said flight supposedly arrived.
Two hours after Ray’s flight landed, me and Susanna went back to my apartment, sans Ray.
It is just like him to delay my breaking up with him when I finally feel like I have the ability (and backup) to do it.
I call the number he’d sent the last text from, but it goes directly to an automated voicemail box that hasn’t been set up. He hadn’t even told me what hotel he was staying at in Atlantic City.
I text:
It’s Violet. Did your flight change? I waited at the airport for you. Can you please call me?
“The big question,” I say, after putting my phone down, “is do I call Killian Coulter and ask him about Ray, or do I do nothing?”
I’ve already filled her in on the basics about Killian while we waited at the airport and she told me his name was familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. Now, on my second glass of wine, her third, I’ve given her some of the story about my life the past two years. It’s hard to put what I’ve been through into words.
How do you explain that you allowed someone to systematically tear you down until you felt nothing like yourself?
How do you adequately explain how it feels to just try to be invisible because it feels like the best defense you’ve got?
She didn’t seem like she understood when I told her one day I’m defending him and believing in him and then I find myself walking on tiptoes through a minefield trying my best to not get myself blown up.
And when I say things about the little threats, the bigger threats, she has an answer for it all. I should’ve called the cops, my parents, her. So what if he posts those nudes online. So what if things get hard for a bit until they can get better. It’d be worth it.
She’s right, of course, but I’ve felt hopeless. I’ve felt like I have had nowhere to go, no one to turn to because I’d defended him to everyone around me to the point that I’d felt I became alienated with all of them until I found myself pulling away even as I started to realize that they were right. And how stupid and worthless I began to feel. How angry at myself for allowing myself to become this version of me. And she hits the nail on the head when she tells me I let him win, I let him do to me precisely what he wanted me to do – be too afraid to leave.
When I told her it took a whole lot of courage to call her the day before, how I got the stress-poops before I did it, she didn’t get that. She didn’t understand why I let it go on so long, why I didn’t call her a long time ago for help.
I guess I didn’t fully get it either, except to say that having a week away from him and having it get to where it did two nights before he left, where he was so unglued that I absolutely feared for my life probably snapped me into action. I feared he was circling the drain and was going to pull me down with him.
“He was so desperate I could see it turning into a murder suicide, Suse, and I knew I had to make it fucking stop. If Killian hadn’t gotten here when he did… I don’t know what would’ve happened. I’m sure there was about to be another major blowup because I wasn’t coming in with answers to his problems.”
She downs the rest of her drink and pours another.
I give her the best example I can think of, in describing what happened that night before he left, how he blamed me, spazzed out on me, threw himself into my lap into tears. She tries, but I know she doesn’t fully get it. I can’t really blame her. It wasn’t an overnight thing; it was progressive. I’d been gaslit, broken, I’d become weak, afraid, and essentially a shadow of my former self.
“In the beginning, when reality started to sink in, I thought he needed mental help. I thought maybe with counseling or medication, things could be better. He wouldn’t listen. He would blow up so bad that I stopped making those suggestions. I started making excuses to myself for him, too. He’s in a bad mood but it’ll get better when he gets back to work, if I get an advance, by next payday when things aren’t so tight, or whatever. I was just making excuses. And then when he broke my grandmother’s doll, and the threats weren’t so subtle…”