"The years that are gone seem like dreams—if one might go on sleeping and dreaming—but to wake up and find—oh! well! Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life."

-- The Awakening, Kate Chopin

Part 1 

Spring 1955

-One-

I hadn't even considered how we would return home to our children after that night. When we entered the house, both of us were battered from our mortal struggle. Dried blood in my hair. His own blood stained through his khaki pants, a deep rust color. More than anything,  it lingered, the feeling of a gun pointed directly at me, at my face. Jeff's hand holding it, his eyes so full of hatred and violence. One little choice, had spared me. It was to step gently on the accelerator, it was to knock him Off balance and send the gun flying. It was a split second, a synchronicity, luck. We would have fought to the end. I knew it was so one of us could go on because we couldn't continue together. 

 Suddenly just as the nightmare that it was --we were thrust back into the ironies of good and evil, light and dark-- we were found ourselves at home. It was still early, not even nine o'clock. The lights glowed a comforting yellow as we walked into the front room. The house was quiet. We had spent hours in hell and nothing had changed. Both of our other children were in bed. Miriam, our housekeeper and Elise, our nanny must have retired too. Our little boy, Charlie had been with us through the trauma at the lake and he had fallen asleep in the car, in my arms. Jeff had carried him into the house. I could see my son was in a remote slumber and his breathing was irregular and he let out a little cry now and then. Restless. We entered the front room and I looked into Jeff's eyes. I must have looked horrible; my face was scratched and bruised. Remarkably other than the wound on his leg, he didn't look very different than usual.

It was a perverse kind of ordinary.

"I'll put Charlie to bed." He said.

"All right,' my voice was hollow, quiet. I was still spinning but found my place beside him, the only way I knew to be. A wife. "I'm going upstairs."

He nodded, but there was the absence of a dominance he'd always reserved for me. A fatherly sternness or a paternalistic amusement, sometimes enchantment. "All right." He walked back towards the children's rooms in that way an adult carrying a sleeping child does. Slowly, with their gait showing the burden of the weight.

When I entered our bathroom, I turned on the light above the sink and stared at myself in the mirror. I looked evil, but I wasn't startled to see my reflection. My hair was matted and I had a gash in my forehead from where I'd fallen on the rocks trying to escape from Jeff. I still had fading bruises from his beating a few nights before. It was even more than that ugliness, something else lurked behind my eyes.

I ran a tub and once it was full, I submerged myself in warm water. I ran my fingers through my matted hair and the water turned pink. There were flecks of dried blood. My wound burned when it met the warm water. I emptied the tub and watched the pink flow down the drain. I filled the bath a second time. This time I washed my body with soap and rinsed my hair again. I lay in the tub for quite a while and traced the condensation on the window beside it, the one that looked out over the garden. It was dark outside. Maybe an hour had passed since we arrived home. . I could see the moon and rather than the dark silhouette of my gardens and the woods beyond, it was all dark, black ink not air and land, not the pond or footbridge. The orchards and cutting gardens were hidden too. It was as though everything in that moment, in my consciousness, was inside of me. It was me.

There was a gentle knock on the door. I knew it was Jeff. Anyone else, maybe even myself at a different point in time, would have feared him. Anyone else would have thought he would finish what he started, but I knew better.

He opened the door slowly and I saw he'd changed into his pajamas. He had cleaned himself up too. He must have showered in one of the other bathrooms. He sat down on the bench near the tub. I didn't say anything and for a time he didn't either. It was a strange intimacy. Of course it was, it had been just the two of us, face to face confronting death and evil. Violence whose source we didn't know. I soaked in the tub and didn't look up until he finally spoke.

"I'm going to do what I told you," he said softly, "we'll go to the attorney tomorrow." I turned and looked at him. I nodded. I'm sure he was so accustomed to my deference to him that he assumed that I was still the same. I wasn't planning on returning home with him but he had told me that we would visit an attorney and see to it I adopted his two children as I'd wished. Legally I would be their mother. Should I want to leave him I could have custody rights to them as well as our son, Charlie. He was going to secure money in my name so I would have access. In essence, he was going to unlock all the doors he'd locked to keep me prisoner. It was a little shocking when he ran off the list of things he would do to get me to come back. I would be able to drive the car, have a set of keys. I would have my own money. I would be the children's legal guardian. He was conceding some of his power over me.

"I knew you would." I looked at him and his eyes met mine. It would have been a time to apologize but he didn't. Neither did I.

"I think we should try to stay together until the children are a little older," I said.

He nodded, then looked up. It seemed he was considering what I was saying, "yes, I think you're right." He whispered.

"I don't want it to be like we're strangers." I offered. "Or so angry at each other. I think we each should come and go as we please. I think we should try and get along."

He nodded again. Again, he looked at me. His eyes looked tired. I felt a warmth in my heart, maternal. If things were as they had been, I would have offered a gentle smile and told him I could see how tired he was, that he should go to bed and we could talk the next day over breakfast. But that wasn't me any more.

"I really don't want the hatred. I think the only way is to avoid being too close."

He started to say something and looked down at the floor. Bit his lip. "Whatever you think Eve. I don't know what to say or do."

I started to get out of the tub and he stood and retrieved a towel from the linen closet. He held it open and I stepped into it. I smiled at him; it was such a fatherly gesture and he would never have done that before. He would have followed my body with his eyes, I would have retrieved the towel and wrapped it around my self and then he would have stood next to me looking down on me, close enough to insight an anticipation, a nervousness in me. He would have loosened the towel and let it fall. Instead, he retrieved another towel and stood behind me, drying my hair. I looked in the mirror at us both. He still looked strong and, although battered, I somehow did too.

Months went on with our home life different than it had ever been. It was empty. It was a strange emptiness because it wasn't void of love but it was also not filled with rage and fear. I didn't know at the time but it was not interminable. It was expectant. I knew that I had to avoid being too close during our time together. In the past, my indifference had been so imbued with rage that it was still a way of engaging with him. He would up the ante, hurt me in so many ways, and then I would be flagrantly disrespectful and pointedly unkind. For that short period in our marriage, I kept myself still while things orbited around me. I didn't venture close to his emotions. That didn't mean I wasn't available and kind. I was. In fact, I know he wouldn't ever admit it, but I thought that we had become friends during that time. We had never been friends. I'd always felt wanted, so pulled under by his desire and passion or so devastated by his rejection, but that was it. It was simply two sides of the same coin. It was his construction of me that he'd possessed all those years, and during those final months of our marriage I was true myself. Or rather, the hint of the woman I was to become. During this incubation, I shared things with him, but nothing that would render me vulnerable. That, I realized, was what had always endangered me. If I were to trust him or yearn for him again, if I were to expose something that was important to me, in essence if I did any tinkering what-so-ever with power he would eventually explode.