He could never forget her wounded expression as she widened her eyes and tried to speak through her dried-up lips. In that instant, he had known how deep his betrayal must have sliced her.
Andrew was the kind of man who couldn’t even hold his wife’s hand while she lay weak and lifeless, yearning for his warmth; couldn’t stay by her side when she had no one else to hold on to. No matter how much he had wanted to whisper so many encouraging, words to her, apologize for his neglect and hug her tight enough to wring all the despair out of her motionless body, all he had done was run away.
Ashley had been his only family and he had disappointed her, the same way he had disappointed his dad all throughout his life. He couldn’t give any happiness to the people closest to him.
And he was still avoiding hospitals. Those places triggered flashbacks. Last year, even after contracting a serious infection, he had refused to step into one, instead, making his physician do a house call.
Dr. Yu had given him an ultimatum—he would not come again unless Andrew saw a psychiatrist about the panic disorder Dr. Yu believed he was suffering from. After six years of neglect, Andrew’s case had advanced into something unmanageable, even affecting his work at times.
He had started treatment after understanding the graveness of his problem. He was still in the initial stages of therapy, so it would be a while before he could step into hospitals or become immune to his ‘triggers,’ but he was determined to triumph over this illness.
Adele’s heels planted themselves in front of his body on the marble flooring. She handed him a pale blue pill with a glass of water. He chugged it down, but stayed rooted where he was. Having taken the medicine made him feel better. The chemicals would only slowly spread in his bloodstream, but the mental relief was fast.
“I’ll cancel your afternoon meetings with the design and finance departments. Will you be taking the rest of the day off?” she asked.
“No, I’ll be okay in an hour. Keep my meetings as they are. I’ve already postponed the design meeting twice.”
She looked worried. “Mr. Smith, you need to rest. You have been working very hard recently.”
“I know my limits.”
Adele didn’t argue.
“Do you want me to ring up Dr. Clark and tell him about this?” she asked.
Dr. Clark, his psychotherapist, had instructed him to call if his panic attacks came again. But Andrew didn’t want to. He had a breakneck schedule. Dracosys had an international product launch in six months and his book was going to hit the stands in four months, and with the financial year ending soon, the year-end reports had to be checked. Between this and that, he barely had time to blink.
“It’s not necessary.”
She crossed one bony leg in front of the other, the doubt in her eyes reflecting that she wasn’t sure about his decision.
“You can leave now.” The curtness indicated that her function here was served.
She was still unconvinced. “Take care, Mr. Smith.”
He spent the next fifteen minutes emptying his mind of what had happened. It would affect his work if he let himself linger on it for too long.
When his mind was blank, he turned to the computer screen.
***
Andrew’s apartment on Riverside Boulevard was haunted by an eerie silence when he rolled in after work. The cool air from the air conditioner hit his face. It was midnight.
The window, cradled above the dark waters of the Hudson River, provided the best vantage point to view the city’s parade of lights from. New York was a glittering jewel at this hour.
Dropping his laptop on the couch, he wandered to the phone.
Carl had left him three messages. That was novel for a man who didn’t remember that he had a son for the larger part of the year. Despite the curiosity, Andrew resisted.
When he showered, the steam from the water melted the tiredness in his muscles, but did little for his overworked eyes. He lingered in the shower longer than he should have. It was midnight and he was in no mood to go over product strategy.
He could defer it to tomorrow. Wait. Tomorrow was already here.
Groaning, he shut off the spray of warmth and gave himself a mental pep talk. His job was impossible on most days, but he loved it, so he was going to get through this one last pending task for today.
Patting his hair dry, Andrew sat down at his computer and scoffed at the desktop background. It was his wedding portrait.
It was impossible to take his eyes off Ashley in the picture. Her face was pasted with the widest grin. So was his. This was probably the only picture he had of himself in which he was smiling. This was the only time in his life when he’d had everything. Including happiness.
Instead of the pie chart on his computer screen, he found himself thinking of her.
She looked different now. She had curves. Dangerously seductive curves. She carried herself with a confidence she had lacked. Her shoulders didn’t slouch anymore.
His phone cried out for attention. An unknown number.
“Hello?”
“What the hell have you been doing? I called thrice.” Hearing his father’s voice put Andrew on edge. He crushed a sheet of paper within his reach.
“Did you get my messages?”
He should have slammed the phone back down right then, but he couldn’t. That would be admitting that he wasn’t strong enough to face his father. “No, I was busy.”
There was a growl from the old man. Carl Smith wasn’t known for his even temper. “Your company is not even big enough to have offices in three countries and you are already struggling with the workload? You’ve become inefficient. You should have stayed working at Finn. It would have toughened you up.”
“Did you have something to say or did you call because you needed someone to pick on in the middle of the night?” The sharpness in Andrew’s voice was a warning to back off.
“Frank is retiring next month. I want you to take over as vice-president. You’ve been VP before. You know the company.”
Andrew stifled the urge to laugh. Did Carl think he could still tell him what to do?
“I have my own company to run. And a book release in four months.”
“Appoint someone else CEO. I need you here.”
“Appoint someone else vice-president. Finn Associates means nothing to me now. If that was all you had to say, then goodnight.”
Why he still expected validation from his father was beyond him. Carl had stopped communicating with him when Andrew had set up his company. Getting the old man to acknowledge him would be the ultimate victory.
“Wait. How is your wife now?” There was genuine worry under the rough tone.
This was a new one. Carl had never bothered to enquire about Ashley when she had been married to Andrew. What was with the sudden curiosity?
“She’s okay. We divorced seven years ago.”
“Why? You begged me for money to pay her medical bills. I thought you’d stick to her. You were so attached to her.”
“I paid you back, so why are you bringing that up?”
Andrew hated revisiting the past. Especially the part where he had cried in front of his father, pleading for money. It had been the single most humiliating moment in his life.
“Lending to you at that time was a huge risk. I hope you appreciate that. You had no stable source of income.”
If that was meant to make him feel obliged, it was a useless attempt. Unlike some parents, his father had not given him money, but lent it. With five percent interest.
“I’m not going to become vice-president. Look for someone else.”
Carl expelled a rush of air. “It’s not easy to find someone to replace Frank. Frank was exceptional.”
“Then why do you want me in his position? In your own words, I am lazy, inefficient and overly emotional.”
“But you’re still my son. You can be trained.”
How convenient to bring up their blood relation when it benefited Ca
rl. Once, Andrew would have clung to the shallow displays of parental affection, but that time was long gone.
“I was your son when I asked you for money six years ago, too.” Carl had just as conveniently forgotten about their blood relation back then.
“That’s a different matter. Don’t mix money with family.”
“And hiring me for Frank’s position is not mixing money with family?”
That made Carl back off and drop the subject.
“Anyway, I’m having a party for my seventy-first birthday. I’d like to see you there. You remember when my birthday is, don’t you? September eighteenth.”
“I’m busy on that day,” Andrew said, without even trying to check his calendar.
“It’s after eight.”
“I’m still busy.” he repeated.
“There’ll be some people you haven’t met in a long time.”
“Good night. I have work to do. And I’m sure you do too.”
When Carl didn’t argue, Andrew cut the call.
Chapter 7
July 2009
Past
Ashley was lying in a puddle of blood. Her hair was soaked, the beach blonde dyed vermillion. His pulse ceased. For a minute, he imagined the worst. She was gone.
The breeze from the half-open window rippled her hair. She lay with her spine curved like a fetus. Her eyelids were closed. But her chest didn’t move.
Her fist was frozen with a knife in the puddle of blood near it. The slashes on her wrist were still visible beneath the layer of blood over it. It was a gruesome thing to watch her spilling flesh mingling with blood.
The soles of his oxfords slid against the blood. Tiptoeing closer to her, he speed-dialed 911. He was afraid to touch her. To confirm the facts. He would rather live in a bubble of ignorance than confront her death.
Fear snatched away the even hum of his heartbeat. He prayed he wasn’t too late. Because if he was…
Before he could take that line of thought any further, someone at the other end picked up his call.
“Hello.” His voice was unsteady. He chewed on his fingernails, trying to tranquilize his frayed nerves. It didn’t help.
“Hello, sir, what’s your emergency?” the phone operator asked. A female voice.
“Can you please send an ambulance down to…” He gave the operator his address. “My wife. I think she’s dead.” His voice was so disconnected from his emotions that the person saying those words could have been a pedestrian down the street.
“Okay, sir. I will have one dispatched to your address as soon as possible.”
Andrew’s throat clenched when he focused on a drop of blood trickling over her forehead. If he was capable of reaching out and wiping it away, he’d have done that. But having her blood on his hands, literally, made him squeamish.
The inverted crescent moon of her lips, now a permanent angry pout, bore the burden of a relationship gone wrong. How could one year have brought her to this?
Something rustled on the kitchen counter. It was a thin cardboard-bound notebook. It flew to the sofa when the breeze from the window pushed it, and landed face up. The double-curled ‘s’ and slanting ‘l’—her handwriting. Andrew knelt down to pick it up and started reading.
I wish I had never loved him. It’s too painful. He is toxic to my wellbeing, but I can’t find the strength to leave him. He’s imprisoned me in this miserable life, drugged me with his lies and false promises. The only way I will ever leave him, the only way I’ll ever get him out of my life, is if I leave altogether…
It was the last entry, the last page of the notebook. Andrew turned to the front page, steeling himself for another dose of anguish.
May 5th
I spend the evenings watching romantic comedies on TV. I can’t laugh at the jokes anymore. The people on screen make me painfully aware of everything missing in me. Why can’t my life be a romantic fairytale too? Why can’t I have a high-profile career and a loving husband? Why did the funny, spontaneous guy I married turn into a distant workaholic whom I am unable to share my distress with?
The psychiatrist I was referred to by my counselor asked me to continue therapy and prescribed me some meds. He says there is something chemically wrong in my brain; that’s why I feel like this.
But I don’t agree with that.
I think the problem is outside, not inside my brain.
May 6th
I let myself down every day. I imagined that I would grow up to be someone important—not another face on the counter of a Walgreens pharmacy with all the value of a barcode scanner. It’s not much better at home. Andrew hardly looks at me, and his mind is elsewhere, even when he is kissing me.
I promised myself I’d look for a new job, but when I try to, I realize how under-qualified I am for every position. I feel like what I want keeps getting out of reach. Am I always going to be someone with no accomplishments? Someone with no identity other than being the backdrop of other people’s lives?
May 7th
Andrew postponed our dinner again. He has to go to Arizona to fix an issue that came up. Every week, he has a new excuse.
I smiled like a good, supportive wife and pretended to understand him. He is the only thing I have in this world, after all.
My psychologist tells me that the cause of my depression is my low self-esteem, but how is an underemployed, neglected wife supposed to have self-esteem? I don’t even know who I am. I don’t know if that matters to him. I don’t know if it matters to me.
Andrew sensed the burn in his throat as tears begged to be released. He closed the book. He couldn’t read any more.
Had he been so oblivious to her suffering? In his limited mind, he had trusted that she was happy and content. Her tone had been optimistic in their phone conversations. Had all that been a facade to keep him from worrying? Had she been crying when he had imagined her to be laughing?
Her flare-up last night and her threat to file for divorce had plagued his mind all day today at work. It must have been an irrational reaction caused by frustration, he had told himself.
He didn’t want to admit that it had been building up—that he had been ignoring the signs all along. She had stopped going on girls’ nights out with Bella, she had stopped talking about herself or her parents, she had started growing thinner and quieter.
He hadn’t seen her this morning and had assumed that she had left for Greenport.
Had she gone to work instead?
That she would sacrifice her health in order to do what was required of her imbued him with more self-hatred. The reason she was working was so that they could run the house while he continued to pour any money he had into the company’s expansion. So he could continue spending more time away from her. Continue being selfish and irresponsible.
Her graceful fingers were splayed on the laminate. He picked up the flawless hand and kissed it one last time, blood staining his lips.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for letting you down.”
His control blew out and a deluge of spasms contracted his chest as he sobbed. The capability to talk dissolved into the deep sadness circling in his lungs.
How could he ever say everything he wanted to? How could she hear when she was gone? Where should he begin? Should he start with ‘sorry’ or ‘thank you’ or was what he needed to say beyond the capacity of those words? She was the reason he was able to get up every morning, survive the ordeals and crises at Dracosys and still live to see the next day.
The warm words she put into his ears and the warm food she put into his belly, those were the two things that made his day. They were the small, unnoticed, mundane things he had never given her credit for, taking them for granted.
The honeymoon… it had all gone south from there. The company’s ambitious expansion plans, brought on in part by his father’s taunt on his wedding day, had consumed him in a vortex of endless work.
Ashley had gone from being the centerpiece in his life to a sleepy snore he encountered in bed
at night for the final few breaths before he fell asleep.
He had been so swallowed up in proving his father wrong that he had actually proved Carl right by making Ashley want to divorce him.
No woman sticks with men like us, Carl had said on his wedding day. Unwittingly Andrew had become a clone of his own work-obsessed, ambitious, heartless father, aiming for success at the cost of his personal life.
The blaring of the ambulance siren carried all the way up to the apartment through the window. His downward-spiraling thoughts were relegated to the back of his mind.
The paramedics burst in through the open door and carried her out on a stretcher. Their hushed voices and frantic expressions reinforced his pounding anxiety. He seized the shoulder of one of the paramedics to steady himself.
“Will she be okay? Is she alive?” He was an emotional wreck, and the guy was right trying to ignore him.
Andrew held on to her fragile, lifeless hand until they fed her into the ambulance and put her on support with an oxygen mask.
“What’s her blood type?” the paramedic asked.
“B positive.”
“And you are…?”
“A positive.”
“No, how are you related to her?”
“I’m her husband.” Technically speaking.
“Will you be accompanying her?”
“Yes, of course.”
The medic gave Ashley’s body a lengthy glance. “This is quite a serious case. She’s lost a lot of blood and…” He put a hand on Andrew’s shoulder, his face painted with a sorry expression. “You should prepare yourself for the worst. Do you know how this happened? How long ago?”
Questions spun around in Andrew’s muddled head. When had this happened? He scrambled for something, anything, that could help him place her act.
He usually called her at eleven every day and then again at five, when she got off her shift. But today, there had been no phone calls—only brooding resentment at her for having sprung a sudden tantrum on him yesterday. If he had been able to see beyond his own hurt ego, maybe he could have prevented this.
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