“Obviously it isn’t,” he says. “And I don’t want it to be. Our marriage can be whatever we want, whatever makes you happy. Only we can define what it will be.”
I don’t want to hear his promises because they sound too rational, and I’m not rational right now. I’m shaking with emotion. I don’t want to think about marriage as protection and support, the way it’s felt lately, because then I’ll need him, and what happens when he walks away from me then? It’s easier to fall back into the ingrained ideas I’ve held so long.
“It’s the end of freedom,” I say, clinging to the empty words I heard so many times, and now I’ve repeated so many times like a mantra.
“What do you want the freedom to do?” he asks. “I’ve given you freedom, Eliza. We don’t even live together, for fuck’s sake. If you want to go to school, or get a job, or travel… Eliza, I’m here to support you in that, or work through whatever you’re going through, or figure out what you want to do. Just let me be part of it.”
“I don’t know what I want, okay?” I say, fresh tears springing to my eyes. “I just want to be free.”
“As long as it’s not the freedom to fuck other guys, you can still have whatever freedoms you want. Just talk to me, Eliza. You seem obsessed with this idea, but how can I give you that when I don’t know what you want the freedom to do?”
“To live my life,” I say, throwing my hands up. “The lifeIchoose. As I please. Just like my mom did.”
A life not controlled by him or my father or anyone, not even my own body. Most of all, I want to be free of my demons. But they’re clawing their way out of me, tearing me apart from within, and I can’t stop them. I know I’m ruining this, all the progress we’ve made, and it’s not even his fault. It’s mine. But I keep on doing it because I want him to go, to show me that he’s one more person who wants to use me in the name of love, to hurt me and twist my heart around until I don’t know what’s right and wrong, what I want, how I feel, becauseeverythingis wrong.
King is quiet for a minute. “The freedom to leave your daughter to grieve both you and her brother because you can’t handle the child you chose to have?”
“You don’t know anything about my mother,” I snap. “She was protecting me.”
“I know that if one of your parents is a hero, it’s not your mother.”
I don’t want to hear his words, don’t want to think about them. I can’t. I have to hurt him more than he hurts me, hurt him before he can destroy me. So I give a derisive snort. “Of course you’d think the killer is a hero,” I say. “Because you’re a pussy, and you’d rather follow in a monster’s footsteps than admit it.”
I don’t know where the words are coming from, it’s like they’re someone else’s, the last words of that wounded animal that lives inside of me with one instinct, the instinct to protect me, to keep the secret, to keep others away because if they know, they’ll destroy me. It’s telling me that I don’t need anyone else, that they’ll always leave, and it’s all I will have left. It’s been with me since I was a little girl, this little monster of my own, born in the bottom of a bathtub where there was no air, because I was a bad girl.
Good girls obey. Good girls get to breathe.
Bad girls get fingers around their throats, pushing them down, and lungs that burn for oxygen, and a head that thunders like waves crashing against the shore in a storm, and the yearning for one abstract idea that worms from the back of their black eyelids into their brains and makes a home there until it takes shape when they’re old enough to understand what they’ve wanted all along.
Freedom.
“Your father might be a killer, but he also raised you on his own,” King says quietly. “I know how fucking hard that is, trust me.”
I take a deep, shaky breath and give my eyes an angry swipe before I turn back to him, so relieved for the opening that I could cry all over again. “How would you know that?”
He pauses for a moment, his dark eyes troubled. “I wouldn’t,” he says at last.
“What, you’re a dad?” I ask. “Where’s this kid you raised all alone?”
“I’m not a father,” he says, turning away.
“Then how would you know?” I press. I can feel I’ve hit a sore spot, and I want to keep poking it, the way my thumb will keep finding a bruise, worrying it. Poking it to make sure it still hurts, that I can still feel something, that I’m still part human. I’ve spent half my life proving to myself that I’m still alive, that I’m not numb anymore. I’ve drank and partied and danced and fought with my friends and made out with guys, all in a quest to prove that I still feel, because I’m not a monster, and that I still control myself, because I’m not an animal.
“I don’t,” King snaps. “Forget it.”
“Who are you talking about, King?” I press. “I heard you and your brothers moved to the South with your dad. That means you’re talking about him. He’s such a big hero for leaving your mom alone in the city?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“See how it feels when someone acts like they know you?” I ask, though I want to ask about his sister, his parents, his brothers. I want to know everything about him. There is more to this man than I know, so much more. But it’s dangerous to go down that path, because knowing someone means caring about them, and I can’t care more. It brings us too close, brings him too close to the truth that I swore I’d never tell. I don’t get close to people for this very reason. My secrets are too dark, too horrible. If I let someone in, I’ll care, and when they find out the truth, they’ll leave, and I won’t survive another blow like that. At least King had the decency to let me do the leaving. I’m the one who walked out, just like she did.
I bend and pick up my clothes, turning away from the bed before pulling on my bra and reaching behind me to hook it closed.
“It was your mom, wasn’t it?”
My hands freeze, and I just stand there with my fingers paralyzed on the clasp, the hooks an inch from engaging. “What?”
“It was your mom,” he says. “That’s why you aren’t triggered by touching a man, even in the most intimate ways. You’re only freaked out when I touch you.”