No More Left
“I’m not angry at you, Ted,” Audrey said, suppressing the desire to cross her arms over her chest as she studied the man slumped at the kitchen table. “I don’t know if you can believe that, but I’m not.”
“Then we can try again, can’t we?” He lifted his gaze, some fuzzy tendril of hope contorting his broad features.
“No.” She was careful not to emphasize the word. “That possibility has been gone for a while.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said, brows jerking together. “You don’t believe that! Not now. Not when we’re finally clear and free.”
The timing was the thing getting to him. A year ago, he’d’ve understood, or thought he did. A year ago, the future was as dark and thunderous as the end of the world.
“At least tell me why.”
“There’s no point.” He knew why. She shifted from one foot to the other. “You get defensive and stop listening.”
“I won’t,” he said. There was a faint thread of doubt in his voice, and Audrey wondered if he heard it — recognized it for what it was. “I promise — I’ll just listen.”
If he’d ever been capable of that, she’d never seen it. They wouldn’t be in this position if that had been within his control. What did it matter now, really? A headache throbbed behind her temples, reaching for the back of her eyes. Fatigue was eating its way through her bones.
“The reasons haven’t changed,” she said. “They’re the same as they were two years ago — five — ten — ”
“That was different — ” The words burst from him and his mouth snapped shut with a click of teeth as they stared at each other in the charged silence that followed.
He had the grace to look away, to look down at the scarred tabletop. “I-I’m sorry — I didn’t mean…”
“It was different but it was the same thing.” She shrugged. “The same underlying problem, Ted.”
Drawing in a deep breath, she tilted her head back, hoping to ease the twin bolts of lancing pain that reached from her shoulder blades up into her skull.
“The jobs, the stresses, trying to live the way you did…it was guaranteed to affect you,” she said. “I understood that. Maybe you don’t remember, but I spent most of the weekends trying to involve you in our life…with the kids…with the farm…”
His shoulders sagged and she knew he did remember. He’d spent the weekends glued to his computer, not for work but for escape. At the time, it’d been hard to differentiate between his desires to escape from the torture of his working week, and what had looked like a desire to escape from his home life as well.
“It’s been fourteen years,” she said, knowing the barb would get a reaction, unsure of what she was trying to provoke. “I needed you over those years. I needed a friend. A husband. A lover.”
But that had been too hard. She’d wondered if he’d gained the weight to give himself an excuse for not being able to be intimate. Wondered if he’d thought about his actions with that level of deliberation. Not something she wanted to imagine, but it was equally difficult to imagine he didn’t realize the way in which his actions had stifled, then poisoned their marriage and her love.
“I — ” His voice was too high and he cleared his throat, gaze flicking from her to the doorway, his features losing animation. “I hated you for staying home.”
Waving a hand vaguely around the room, he continued, “Hated you for being here, with the kids. You got the life you wanted. I got the hard labor, the being away from home.”
Her breath left her lungs without warning, bright sparks filling the edges of her vision. Through them, she could just see his face, mouth curling down in a sneer.
“You knew that.” His voice was flat.
And she had, she acknowledged, as her lungs burned. She gulped in a mouthful of air.
“You didn’t once say: ‘I’ll get a job for a couple of years’.”
No, she hadn’t. She’d thought about it, tried to weigh up the pros and cons. She could’ve worked away from her home without suffering the isolation he had. He could not do the work with the animals and the school and the community that she did.
“You should’ve said something.” Or maybe she should have offered. Would it have changed anything? When their daughter was born, she’d been working. Remotely. Going into the office once a month. He’d cooked, cleaned sporadically, brought in the firewood. Nothing else.
He cocked a brow at her. “You had your excuses.”
The trap yawned open at her feet. Her smile felt thin as she took a deliberated step back. “You’re right. I made mistakes. That was one of them.”
He got up and stalked around the table, passing close but without touching. Touch, even the lightest, most casual brush of affection, had disappeared years before. The sideboard rattled as he yanked open the door, pulling out a bottle and glass and thumping them down on the top.
“You had the easy life.” Liquid gurgled from the bottle’s neck into the glass. “Here. A bit of fencing, a bit of wood-cutting. Writing — like it was some gift only you had.” The scritch of the cap as he screwed it back on. “Writing! Yeah, right — I had to read that shit, had to pretend like it was going to do anything for our life, knowing it was shit.”
He swung around, amber fluid sloshing up the side of the chunky glass. “I made the money. I gave up my happiness so you could play around here. I gave you everything! And you stopped loving me ’cause I didn’t want to fuck you?! Well, boo-fucking-hoo!”
Audrey took a step back along the counter as he lurched toward her, the sweet stench of bourbon filling the room. Her stomach was in knots, the pain in her neck twisting and tightening into a high-pitched shriek of agony.
There were no surprises, not really. The thought was dull in her mind. The years had shown what lay beneath the surface, in action and reaction, if not words.
“I didn’t want to marry you,” Ted snarled, tossing down the double. “We were done, I was out, then you had to get pregnant, didn’t you?”
She ducked as the glass left his hand, hitting the brick chimney a couple of feet to her left and exploding in a shower of fragments.
“That wasn’t my choice!” His chest heaved, skin a blotchy red and white as he leaned against the counter.
Something stung at the edge of Audrey’s hairline. She lifted her hand, wincing at the sharper stab as her fingertips brushed over the sliver of glass. It fell to the floor with a faint tinkle. Her fingers came away red.
There was no difficulty in recalling the phone call she’d made, several nights after the doctor’s visit. Their relationship had been on hold then, nothing said but a lack of impetus allowing days then weeks to drift by without contact. She’d made her decision and had called only to let him know. Had repeated, over and over, there was no obligation, no need to feel responsible. He’d proposed over the phone and again the next day when he’d arrived.
Did years of unhappiness cause holes in memory? Or did unhappiness just twist and deform the facts until they supported the miserable conclusions? Either was possible. Refuting his words wouldn’t change anything. The truth had a habit of coming out when all the other facades had fallen away.
“I didn’t mean that.” His voice was thick.
She lifted her head. Tears ran down his face. She’d never been sure if the anger and swiftly following remorse were caused directly by the liquor, or if the three things existed in a symbiosis, the bourbon triggering a release somehow.
“You did,” she said, pulling herself upright. “It’s okay.”
“You’re bleeding…” he said, face screwing up as he took a step toward her.
She skittered backwards, sneakers crunching through the shattered glass, then shook her head.
“It’s fine.”
The moan rose in his throat, a soft, mournful bellow. “No, it’s not. Don’t — don’t back away, Audrey…stop, please!”
“Ted, we made our choices,” she said. “We made our mistakes. This is the end of the line. I can’t do it anymore — ” Pushing her hair back, she peered at him. “I don’t think you can either.”
“I love you.”
That sparked a genuine flash of amusement and she ducked her head quickly to avoid showing it.
“Yes,” she lied, her attention sharpening on a bright red droplet that appeared on the floor. “Once, we did.”
Once the world had been wide open, sparkling and full of possibilities. Saying who did what was a waste of time. Neither of them had been strong enough to overcome the obstacles. There wasn’t a way to turn back the clock.
“We need to talk about how to tell the kids.”
