Chapter Fifty-three
It’s almost three o’clockin the morning and Dani is still awake. She props herself up on one elbow to stare at her sleeping husband through eyes swollen almost shut from the steady flow of her tears.
She’s been crying for hours. Sometimes it feels as if she’s been crying all her life.
“What are you crying about now?”Nick had demanded earlier, climbing off her back and wiping himself off with a tissue.“You want the boys to hear you? Is that what you’re trying to do?”
“No, Nick.”
“Good. Then get cleaned up and come back to bed. Tomorrow’s a busy day. First thing in the morning, you’re going to go next door and tell your new best friend that if she so much as breathes a word of her unfounded accusations to anyone, we will sue her ass from here to eternity. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“I have half a mind to just go over there right now and shoot the bitch.”
Dani had said nothing, overwhelmed by a combination of relief and guilt. Relief because, for once, Nick’s anger was directed at someone else, guilt for the relief.
Now she peers through the darkness to study her husband’s face in repose. He looks so peaceful. So calm. There’s no tension in his jaw, no snarl in his lips, no trace of fury in the set of his shoulders. Maybe the latest cycle is complete and the worst is over. Maybe once they find a new house, a new environment…
“You’re fooling yourself if you think anything’s going to change,”she hears Maggie say.
She’s right,Dani acknowledges, slipping out of bed and tiptoeing down the hall. She checks on the boys, first Ben, then Tyler. Both are asleep, Tyler curled into a fetal position, Ben on his back, his arms shooting out from his torso like limbs from a tree.
What would happen if she were to rouse them, tell them they were leaving, warn them not to make a sound? Would they ask questions? Would they protest? How far would they get before Nick got wind of what they were doing and came after them?
“Nick’s never gonna let me leave,”she’d told Maggie.“He’ll kill me for sure.”
“He’ll kill you anyway.”
Not if I kill him first,she thinks.
The first time Dani remembers consciously considering killing her husband was at the shooting range. She’d thought of it again after the first time he sodomized her, and every time he’d struck her after that. Still, it was one thing to fantasize about something, another thing entirely to make that fantasy a reality.
Could she do it? Could she kill another human being, especially someone she once loved, the father of her children, for God’s sake, even in self-defense?
Does she really have a choice?
Dani hurries down the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the den. She can’t afford the luxury of thought. If she thinks about it, she’ll lose her nerve.Just do it,she thinks, recalling Nike’s famous motto and stifling a laugh. Not exactly what the company had in mind. She walks directly to the cabinet filled with her husband’s impressive collection of weapons.
It’s locked.
She pulls on its glass door, but it doesn’t budge. “Damn it,” she whispers, crossing quickly to the desk, her shaking hands locating the key in the top drawer, then promptly dropping it, watching helplessly as it bounces along the carpet and disappears under the leather couch. “Damn it,” she says again, louder this time, as she falls to her knees and stretches out prone on the floor, her right arm reaching out in front of her, the palm of that hand searching blindly for the key beneath the sofa.
It feels like forever until she finds it, although it is likely that only a few seconds have elapsed. Her fingers wrap around the jagged piece of metal as she pushes herself back to her feet. In the next instant, she is fitting the key into the lock and opening the cabinet. Seconds later, she is holding the .22 her husband was brandishing earlier.
“I lied,”she hears him say.“Itisloaded.”
She checks to make sure the bullets are still in place. Can she do it? she wonders again. Can she really march back up the stairs, put the gun to her husband’s head, and end this misery once and for all?
“Oh God,” she moans, as she approaches the bottom of the stairs. She stops, her tears resuming their seemingly endless flow. She might be fooling herself if she thinks Nick is ever going to change, but she’s fooling herself even more if she thinks she’s capable of killing him.
Dani stands at the bottom of the stairs for several long seconds before lowering the gun to her side and walking back to the den, returning the gun to the cabinet and locking the cabinet door. She’s returning the key to the top drawer of the desk when she hears footsteps behind her.
“Oh God,” she mutters, closing her eyes and bracing her body for the blow she knows will follow.
“Mom?”
Dani spins around. “Oh my God. Tyler! What are you doin’ up?”