“Amigo,” I whisper, low and clear, before taking another step forward and continuing to stand my ground. His eyes glaze over with a look I recognize. One I have seen many times before. The unexplainable, unstoppable courage building inside us both to remain unmovable, untouchable, fearless in the eye of a storm raging all around you. One that you’re damn sure you won’t let drag you under with it. But I refuse to lose. Not anymore. “The only thing you will find out if Diaz doesn’t show his face is how it feels when I rip the life from your damn body, limb for fucking limb, if you or your jefe stand in our way. Comprender?”
I watch as his left eye twitches. The slightest glimpse of weakness. He’s shaken. Disturbed. Slightly wondering if I really do have the upper hand. And right now, there is no better high than knowing without a doubt that I do. I always will when it comes to protecting her, her life, her children, and putting them first before my own.
“What my friend is really saying,” I hear Brittany chime in behind me as the man slowly breaks our stare and looks her way, “Is that time is of the essence.” I hear her footsteps before she comes into view. I don’t know everything about her past, but I know enough. If this woman can look death in the eye and stand tall, then anyone can. She smiles, a strong confident smile that hints at one thing, she’s already won whatever fucking battle we’re dancing around. “Besides, word on the street is there’s a rat in Diaz’ establishment.” I look back at the man in front of us in time to see the same flicker of panic cross his face. “Not only do we need to unload our shipment, but you can understand our… prisa (haste)… to put as much ground between us and here as possible. If what we hear is the truth,” she says, as she steps a couple feet closer and eyes up the man in front of her with more grit than I have ever seen any woman carry, “It’s best we conduct our business and be on our way,” cocking her head to the side, I see the man fume at her comments. “Don’t you agree?”
*****
Rose
Michael’s grip on my arm tightens as he flings open another door in the house and throws me against a nearby chair. I hit it forcibly and almost knock both me and it over to the floor but catch myself barely in time. His hand scrapes over the stubble on his lower jaw as he takes a step forward and eyes me with a hateful determination. But he’s already broken me once.
There is no way in hell I will let him break me again.
My past may have tried to drown me but it had no clue I knew how to breath underwater, and hell if I will choke on the memories, the regret, the pain that has tortured me day and night and every damn second in between. I am stronger. I am fucking fierce. And it is time I stare the hell that tried to ruin me in the eyes and wear my scars like wings as I finally overcome everything that has tried to drag me under for far too long. It’s time to fly when I never believed I could.
Unless I face my own hell, my own nightmare, I will never move past it. I can never conquer the hold it has on me. I know that now. He was my hell. And like a woman finally waking up from the purgatory she’s been forced to live in all those years, I know I have a choice. And I chose me.
As I straighten up in my seat and stare at him with all the hatred I can muster, his low, evil, venomous laugh fills the room around us. “Fuck Rosie,” he says as he takes a quick step forward and kneels before me. “It didn’t have to be this way, you know? It never had to come to this.” His hand raises and he pushes a few stray strands of hair behind my ear making me tremble out of his touch.
Stay strong Rose. Stay strong and look the devil himself in the eyes. No one can harm you unless you hand them the weapon to do it with yourself. Remember that!
I sit up a little straighter as the voice inside me, the one that has always been full of fear, changes and takes on a new life. “You say that like you have some sort of conviction,” I seethe. “Something tells me that you could never feel any amount of guilt for what you’ve put me through.”
His eyes cloud over as he frowns before his teeth grind together and he forcibly grabs the back of my head pulling me closer against him. “You’re right,” he bites back. “I don’t! To feel guilty I’d have to feel anything. For you. For the pathetic way you tried to change me. Wreck my life. Take away my freedom. The least I could do was take away yours.” He brushes his thumb down my bottom lip and I resist the urge to bite it off. To maim him. Disfigure the devil. Harm any piece of the man before me I can like the way he has been slowly doing away with every piece of me for years.
“Don’t touch me,” I hiss out under my breath as I grind my teeth against one another and my posture in the chair becomes hostile. “Don’t fucking touch me!”
His eyes flicker up and lock with mine and a perverse look burns itself into my soul. In one quick movement he spreads my legs with his free hand and forcibly starts to feel his way up to my core. “Touch you?” He whispers. “You mean, like that inadequate fuck you’ve been screwing around with touches you?” His fingers trail closer to my sex and I try to force my legs closed but he holds them apart with ease, always having been much stronger than me. “Tell me,” he whispers again. “When you let him fuck you, let him lay in our bed, did you warn him what kind of woman he was falling for, huh?” He pulls me closer by the back of my neck as his grip on my leg tightens and matches the strong way his fingers are digging into my collarbone. “Did you tell him… how much he would always have to carry you? The weight of a woman who will never ever amount to anything besides fucking baggage.”
Repulsed. Nauseated. Without even thinking as a burning feeling to attack back fills me inside, I pull my head back the little I can and spit right in his fucking face. On impulse his grip tightens as he pulls my head back and forces himself against me harder. I kick, go to scream, but his hand that was once caressing its way up my thigh suddenly releases me and I hear a click a moment later. The cold feeling of metal against my throat stops me and I feel my eyes prick with tears as he holds my head back and I struggle to take a breath.
“Watch it Rosie,” he warns as he holds the knife to my throat. “One of us already died once. Next time, it won’t be me our children have to mourn for the rest of their damn lives.”
He lets me go and backs away slowly. I watch him release me and breathe heavily, my labored breaths matching his own as he wipes his face and makes his way across the room to a desk in the corner. He pulls open a drawer before slipping the knife back in his pocket and produces a piece of paper as I sit and rotate my neck and look around the room for an escape. But the only way out is the way we came in, and he’s blocking it.
“Dear self,” I hear him sarcastically say as he closes the drawer and takes a step back towards me. “You are strong. Courageous. Fearless.” He looks up at me and rolls his eyes in a mocking way. “I believe in you?… Really Rosie? This is the shit you sat around and did while I worked my ass off?” He flings the piece of paper at me and strides a few steps closer. “I don’t know what is more heartbreaking. The fact that you wrote it, or that you actually believed it!”
I look down and see a scrap of paper at my feet. A piece of my past I had forgotten about and never even gave one more thought to after I wrote it. Why? Because I let it all drag me under again. I let every little lie that I had been living speak louder than the damn truth. I believed his deception more than I believed in myself. The weight of the lies were easier to swallow than the heaviness of all that could set me free. Easier to accept. Easier to welcome.
Once I let in one, the rest came tumbling after. And soon, the only way out seemed an impossible undertaking, much like the door across the room guaranteeing me my freedom.
But I wrote that after he left for his last tour, how did he… The question hangs in my eyes as I look up and catch his stare. “How…”
“You don’t think I didn’t keep eyes on you? Watch Liam, stake out a perfect time to make my move. I came back looking for the little bit of cash I’d stashed away before leaving, imagine my shock to find this there instead!”
I found h
is stash and used it to keep us a live, to keep us afloat while I looked for a job and dealt with the fact my husband was dead. How could he be mad at that? I know it wasn’t mine to take but I was so happy to have just a little to get us by when I found it. But just as I try to defend him I push the idea away because the truth is staring me right in the face, the kind of man he really is, and I won’t defend him any longer. Not anymore.
“A strong woman already knows her strength,” he hisses out as he stands above me and I bend to pick up the scrap from my past. “A strong woman doesn’t need anyone but herself. But you see that’s where you have always gone wrong. You’ve always been the enemy you can’t even see, Rosie. Everything comes in second to the one fight you have never been able to win. The fight for control of your mind. To defeat it, you have to overpower yourself. That, Rose, is something you will never ever have the backbone to conquer.”
With heavy strides, he crosses the room and pulls open the door. I hear the slam of the wooden barrier between me and the outside world and stare at the piece of paper in my hands in disbelief as the final battle for my soul rages inside and I am suddenly paralyzed from stopping it.
1.5 years ago
“Have you ever heard the term gaslighting?” I hear Erica say across the room as I look up from my magazine. It’s been almost six months since Michael left for another tour. I found out I was pregnant just one short month before and even though the thrill I felt still lives inside me somewhere, it was quickly stomped out when I told him and he quickly changed the subject, as if the life growing inside me didn’t exist.
“I mean,” I begin to say as I set the magazine down on my lap and trace my mind for exactly what it means and what she may be getting at. “I have, yeah, sure. But why do you ask?”
I put Liam down an hour ago and Erica and I have been sitting in the peaceful silence of a now quiet house ever since. Staying the weekend with me is her new normal, especially with the devil of a man she is divorcing. The one that still won’t leave their house and one she finally just went and got a restraining order against.
She looks up from the book she is reading and catches my eye before glancing back down and reciting aloud. “Gaslighting. By definition is ‘manipulation. By phycological means into questioning a victim’s own reality.’ It’s a tactic of manipulators used to obstruct and distort a victim’s understanding of the real world. They do this by intentionally setting up situations, typically involving a misdeed, and then questioning the victim’s sanity for the way they react. They provoke negative emotions and label the victim as ‘crazy,’ ‘insane,’ thus giving them, the gaslighter, power and control.”
She looks up at me and I swallow hard over a lump in my throat because I know what she is getting at, but I am absolutely not ready to admit or ever say that I’m a victim. “Your point, E?”
She shrugs and picks up her book, examining the cover as she pounders the way she wants to respond. “I mean, I bought this book as a way to help me with my own evil divorce,” she says quietly as she dog ears the page she was on and then flips through it like she’s spinning a roulette wheel. “But, maybe there is something in here for both of us.”
She quickly finds her page again before I can process all she just said and continues. “Signs of gaslighting,” she says sternly aloud as something in the pit of my stomach, something that feels a lot like insight, recognition, hell judgment even starts to bubble up inside me. “Blatant lying and constant coverups. Broken promises and actions that contradict words, that’s two things I’ve been telling you to see in Michael Rose.” I push up out of my seat and walk across the living room to the window and look out. Suddenly sick from having to hear anymore as fear and anxiety creep into my soul and I dread having to face the truth. Facing the truth means a new reality. An unknown future. And I don’t know if I can face it. “Denying conversations or events ever happened…”
“OK,” I shout a little too loud as I spin around and then force myself to settle down so I don’t wake Liam. “I get it! But I told you, his whore showed up on my damn doorstep, E. I saw her. Talked to her. It’s over between them. He promised. He told me he’d change. Right before he left. I have to believe him. I have to trust him.” A small piece of me breaks off inside knowing that she might be right and maybe I never can again, but I force it away and try, with all my might, to believe that him, me, our marriage, it isn’t over.
“The gaslighter is a king at manipulating others to see them differently,” she says quietly as she looks down at the book in her hands once more and reads from its pages. “While the victim, feels like they have to defend reality.” I stand with her words for a moment as my hands begin to tremble. “Are you defending reality, Rose?” She says in a whisper as she looks up at me with sad eyes.
Am I? God, I truly don’t know. I want what’s best. I want what he promised me. Forever. Til death do us part. To take care of each other, in sickness and in health, right?
Sickness? Like the way he calls me crazy. The way he tells me I’ve lost my mind.
But he takes care of me, doesn’t he? He works his ass off. Provides for me and Liam.
I took my vows seriously. I promised him the rest of my life when I walked down the isle. My life isn’t over, not yet. And neither is ours together, is it? We all make mistakes. We are all not perfect. It’s just the weight of everything he is having to do to provide for us, right? I war with myself but damn it if my heart doesn’t know the truth. A creeping reality that makes it sting as it takes root all the more. One day, when our children are older, it will be different, won’t it? We will be better. I will be better. Won’t we?
I shake my head as Erica stands and closes her book. “Don’t confuse reality with some crazy idealistic or notional idea.”
“I’m not…,” I start to say, but she cuts me off.
“Rose,” she says tenderly as she takes another step in my direction. “It’s me. You don’t have to defend yourself. You don’t have to hide. Besides, what best friend would I be if I didn’t call you on your shit from time to time.” She laughs, but all I can manage is a small smile. “I love you,” she says with concern lacing her tone. “We’ve both been through hell. But the difference is, I’m climbing out of mine. I am making a new way where I once didn’t see one before. But you?” Her voice trails off and that feeling, that bitterness inside not wanting to accept what she is saying starts to bubble up again. “I see the damage that has been done even if you don’t. I know the depths of how hard and low he has forced you down to. The way he is making you feel, what he is making you believe, that fighting is useless because it is all in your mind. That you are the issue. But please listen. The battle for power, for self-control, it’s not one that is ever won. But it’s a journey to continue walking, each and every day, as your strength, your courage, your belief in yourself becomes more determined than ever to survive. That’s what he’s is trying most to steal from you. The thought that you alone are enough. Damn it, survive, Rose.”
I bristle at her last words and she notices. I am surviving. I am in control. Why is it that when someone else in life is going through something, they always find a way to make you feel like your situation mirrors their own? I take a step back in annoyance and she smiles thus pissing me off more. I do have the power, don’t I?
“You know, I’ve learned that sometimes, not everyone around you will understand your journey. And that’s OK,” she says as she starts to walk away towards the guestroom across the house. “They don’t need to, it’s not for them to understand, it’s for you. That is, if you don’t deny yourself the truth first.”
Rolling my eyes, I cross the room and watch her leave. She really does tick me off sometimes something fierce. Shaking my head, a piece of my heart drops when I hear the door to her room close because I do know the truth. I completely understand every single fact. And damn it, she’s fucking right. But the problem is, I just don’t want to believe it.
With a heavy sigh I turn and make my
way into the master bedroom. Liam is sprawled out in the middle of the bed and I can’t help but smile. These are the moments, the times in my life I will take with me. That pass all too soon and you never get back. But how can you even enjoy them when something, someone, threatens you at every turn?
Making my way across the room, I turn on the bathroom light and close the door slightly, allowing me to see my way around the room still in the dark. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I lean over and run my hand through my son’s hair. Peaceful. Calm. He lays beside me, proof that love can make something beautiful even if in the end, the love never really existed at all itself. At least not for his father. Because a real man who loved me, would never treat me this way. That’s what my heart wants to believe.
But is that true? I find myself questioning as my hand goes to my stomach and I place it against the child now growing in my lower belly. I feel movement, proof that life exists and I smile. No matter what, my children will always know love. Even if I don’t. Even if I never really did. Even if loving myself, the most simple thing some may take for granted in this world, is something I never really learned how to do and the thought of trying, scares me.
Survive. Control. Power.
I roll my eyes and lean my head back as I look up to the ceiling. I am doing that, aren’t I? The child next to me moves almost at the same instant that the one inside me rolls and causes butterflies to dance in my stomach. Real love, it doesn’t adore you when you’re at your best. It carries you, struggles with you, builds right alongside you at your worst, a future that you both never expected but now can’t live without. Do Michael and I do that? Even as the truth begins to set in that we don’t, he doesn’t, I wonder, maybe, just maybe… but ultimately the fear we might not ever be able to wins and I worry it always will.
When I was younger, I thought that love was fancy gowns, diamond rings, endless star filled night’s that felt like a dream full of breathtaking smiles in the arms of the one you love with millions of stolen kisses. Of never suffering a broken heart and always getting what you wanted because the person next to you, the one you promised to give the world to, wanted to give it right back, and more if they could. But, over time that mirage faded. Reality has become my worst nightmare, and I realize that if that does exist, if even half of it is true, you don’t get there without work. You don’t get there without a fight. Two things I am not sure Michael will ever want to obtain in our marriage, that is, if it’s not directly benefiting him first. And the one thing he has been stealing from me all this time. The fire to fight.
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