Broken (11 page)

***

A
fter another hour or so of setting up my exit, just as the party is getting going and people are talking about food, I find Alex, say goodbye to him and slip out before anyone else notices. I check my phone at regular intervals throughout the day, but I know already that Ethan is not going to call. I wonder if I’ve seen the last of him, that perhaps, the day we met in the park was the day he somehow got cured. I feel bad for Paul, but in the end I don’t go. I can’t. I literally can’t leave the house on my own and risk getting attacked again, no matter how unlikely it is that it will happen.

Eventually I fall into a broken sleep, my mind on the immediacy of surviving another family Christmas.

2
5 December 2015. Eighty nine days after.

Christmas day is completely fucking awful. Dad has told every single member of the family about what happened to me, writing it as part of the ‘family update’ he sends every year in his Christmas cards. I can’t believe it. The first I know is when my uncle calls from Boston and asks if I’ve fully recovered from the attack. I’m shocked. When I get off the phone I’m literally fucking shaking with shock, and Dad doesn’t understand why I’m upset.

“It’s over”, he says. “It’s been three months for Christ sake. People have a right to know.”

I spend the rest of the day in bed and cry myself to sleep. I think seriously about leaving, but don’t want to drive through the night on my own and don’t really want to be back at home in Pittsburgh over Christmas. I can’t believe what he’s done. It makes me sick to the stomach to know that he’s taken something I’ve told him in confidence and spread it out amongst the family as though it’s nothing more serious than a change of job.

Of all the things that my parents have done over the years, this is the lowest. I feel more depressed now than I have done at any other point since this whole fucking thing began. My whole family knows what that bastard did. My whole family knows I’m tainted. Fuck.

This whole thing is so fucked up.

3
0 December 2015. Ninety four days after.

I’m still not talking to my dad. Fuck him. What he did was senseless and thoughtless in equal measure, and there is no-one I’ve been able to talk to about it. No-one that is guaranteed to understand me anyway. I texted Ethan about it, but I still haven’t heard back from him. He’s either ignoring me, not getting my messages at all, or something serious has happened to him. I don’t want any of those things to be true, but I know at least one of them must be.

I feel trapped here, like an exhibit in a cage. A rare animal that some expert hunter has managed to trap and has invited everyone from far and wide to see.

Every day I have to field calls from distant relatives ringing to offer their condolences on my plight and every night I have to sit down at the dinner table and pretend to be civil just so I can get through without breaking down again and showing them just how weak I really am.

I won’t speak to anyone who calls me unless it’s Ethan. The almost non-existent probability he’ll call, the only reason I still have my cell phone turned on at all. I haven’t been in touch with friends I know are looking forward to catching up with me, because I just don’t have the energy. Every night there is something going on, and every night I feel less inclined to join them. After the new year, when the working week starts again, and I can cope with the drive back home, I’m going to get on the road and not look back for another year or more.

I’m done with this family. I’m done with feeling fucked up and broken. I’m done with not having anyone to share it with either.

3
1 December 2015. Ninety five days after.

New year’s Eve. I’m seriously worried about Ethan. It’s been over two weeks since we’ve last spoken. I don’t know if it is or not, but I get the feeling this is uncharacteristic, based on the few interactions we’ve had already. I know I’ll be back home soon, but he’s on my mind. I can’t shift him even if I wanted to. Christmas is a fucking awful time to be by yourself, let alone after having your wife raped and her and your unborn child brutally murdered. Thinking about it puts my own problems into perspective, and I feel selfish to be depending on him so much. My family are fucking idiots, but they are still here at least, alive and breathing, even though sometimes, as horrible as it sounds, I’m so mad by how they behave, I wish they weren’t.

Ethan will never get that back. I haven’t really celebrated Christmas and I know he won’t have either. I know all he will want is for the new year to come and each day to pass by quickly enough that he can start to feel reasonably normal again. Normal is a challenge, but reasonably normal might just be attainable.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time. It has to come, the world doesn’t stop, but this year I wish I’d thought about it more. I wish I’d stayed in Pittsburgh and passed the time with Ethan, instead of driving a full day to come and spend it with a family that doesn’t seem to give one single shit about my feelings.

“Jesus Christ, Jo, you’ve only been raped”, I imagine my father thinking. “Get over it will you. It’s only sex after all.”

The thought makes me shudder. It makes me angry and then it makes me want to cry. Every day the impact is less. Every day I’m further away from that moment, it’s less clear than it initially was, less painful, as though it’s dulled over time in my memory, like it’s an echo and no longer a thing, and that scares me. It scares me to think that a point will come in the future, where I will be so far away from it, it will feel like it no longer belongs to me, that it no longer happened to me at all.

Some people would call that progress, I worry that that kind of acceptance is a lessening of the trauma for myself and everyone else who knows about it or has to talk about it or that has been affected by it in some way. It’s like something that happened so long ago is no longer important, because the effect has already been felt. Like complaining about an earthquake when the earth has stopped shaking. Well even though from the outside it may look like my earth has stopped shaking, I can tell you with absolute certainty, I’m still very much fucked up on the inside. I’m broken in ways i’m learning how to hide, and I’m not even fully aware I’m doing it most of the time. It’s something that I’ve begun to develop naturally as though it’s part of a new evolution.

I wonder if this is what Ethan has become good at - instead of finding ways to cope, finding ways to pretend that he is.

I decide to look for him again, only this time via the internet. I figure if something big has happened, someone will have written about it. It makes sense to discount the possibilities. Isn’t that what the police do when they are searching for a missing person? If you can’t find them with a specific search, cast the net wider.

It doesn’t take me long to find something.

“Fuck”, I can’t help but say out loud when I read it. “Oh fuck, Ethan.”

1
1 January 2016. One hundred and twenty days after.

He wasn’t even on my list. Michael Austin Blake. Twenty four years old, mentally ill. Drug addict, vagrant, wife
and
baby killer. They caught him when the owner of the house he tried to burgle just before Christmas startled him, dragged him from the lawn outside to the front porch and detained him, tied to the wooden railings, until the police came. If that was me. If I only I’d had the chance.

After just under an hour of questioning, he confessed to a series of other burglaries in the area, hoping to reduce his sentence. One of those happened to be my house. Michael Blake had simply forgotten that it was within that particular address on the exact night he mentioned being there, that my wife was raped and killed.

He initially tried to deny it, inventing a story about somehow being confused with which houses he’d burgled and when, and then when pressed, finally admitted his guilt. The responsibility seemed to amuse him. He spoke of that night as though recounting a personal success, a triumph to be proud of. He gave exact details that matched the reports taken by police and medical staff. He spoke of my wife’s fear and his inability to stop. He said he hadn’t meant to kill her, only scare her, and it was all over before he realized it was too late to stop. Knife in her chest some many times it broke six of her ribs.

I feel empty. Nothing. I thought I’d feel anger seeing him stood there, but I don’t. I don’t feel anything at all, unless this is what hate is, the absence of any kind of emotion. He doesn’t look at me. Not once. When he is sentenced and they take him away, I realize i’m shaking so violently I have to sit down again just to control it.

“It’s over”, Jo says, her hand on my arm. “Let’s go home.”

1
1 January 2016. One hundred and six days after.

Ethan is still shaking when we get back to his house. I sit him down, get him some of the new pills his doctor has prescribed, put a glass of water in his hands and sit down on the sofa next to Martin.

A lot of shit has happened since I saw Ethan for the last time before Christmas, and he looks like a completely different man now. In some ways he looks empty, as though there is nothing behind his eyes at all, that the trauma he’s experienced has just kind of scooped him out from within and left nothing but a shell, and in other ways, he looks alleviated, as though a huge weight has finally been lifted from his shoulders.

He’s still drifting out like he used to in the group sessions, but now when he does it, he seems lost completely in the world in which he finds himself in and I have to gently coax him back to reality.

I don’t blame him for wanting to escape. I can’t imagine what he feels like now. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to stand face to face with the man who has raped and killed your wife, to listen to the details of her death again.

He didn’t have to go, his testimony wasn’t required for the conviction, but I completely understand why he did. If that was me, I’m not sure that I would have had the courage.

It wasn’t until a few days after the new year, when the date for the trail was set, that Ethan finally returned my calls.

In a low, even voice, he humbly apologized about not calling me sooner, and even asked how
I
was before explaining why he’d finally called me back. I listened silently to the news I had already read several days before, and then I listened to Ethan break down in tears. By the end of the call, we were both crying our eyes out. I drove back to Pittsburgh the following day, and came straight over to his house to be with him. I’ve been back and forth every day since then, helping him as best as I can to gather himself together. I cannot even begin to describe the strength of the emotion I have begun to feel for him. Seeing Ethan at what must be his weakest point, has cemented within me feelings I felt like I was struggling to understand. In those first few days of the new year, and the days leading up to Blake’s trial, I have realised something that absolutely terrifies me. I’m falling for Ethan.

At first, I thought that it was perhaps sympathy or empathy even, but now I know it’s much stronger than that. Being by his side these last few days, during what must be the most difficult days he has ever had to endure, have brought us so close together, it’s hard for me to describe without sounding ridiculous. After what happened to me, I’m not looking for any kind of physical or sexual contact, I can’t even think about sex without shivers running down my spine, and my heart rate rapidly increasing and not in a good way either. The whole idea of it terrifies me, and I know that anything of the sort would be the last thing that Ethan would want, but I can’t help but notice it because it’s there. From the moment I read about his wife’s killer, to the conversation we had on the phone and the time we have spent together over the last week including today at the trial, I don’t know. It feels like something is happening between us that’s more than just new friends supporting each other through shared experiences. It feels more important than that, more serious. Fuck. I don’t even want to think anymore about it, but it seems like it’s the only thing I think about now.

1
5 January 2016. One hundred and twenty four days after.

Life at the moment is one long blur made up of disjointed, meaningless scenes. I can’t even be certain that a hundred and twenty four days have passed. It could be twelve or one thousand two hundred. One moment I’m holding a gun to my temple, the next, Martin is holding it up in front of me in disbelief, asking me where it’s come from.

My wife is dead. My baby boy too. The man responsible for it all, now rotting away in prison, steel bars and brick walls and the impossibility of revenge between us. Days pass from light to dark almost in an instant. I lose hours. Huge chunks of time seem to evaporate in front of my eyes.

I spend a lot of time in bed, unable to get out of it. Sometimes I don’t even know whether the earth is still turning when I finally gain the courage to do so. My dreams are so intense I wake up drenched in sweat, and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to escape them. I dream about running, but I’ve not been out for what seems like months, and I dream about the people I was working through on my list, the people I made sure weren’t the ones responsible for Alice’s death.

Jo has been like a rock, here almost everyday since I called her. She says it’s just to check up on me, but I see the concern saturating her face, the warmth in her eyes that spring to life when she sees how animated I get to have her around. I can’t find the words to tell her how much her support means to me.

I didn’t know who else to turn to when I found out. I didn’t know who else would understand the pain I was going through, and having her here has been the only thing that has kept me from sinking completely into myself. Time with her is really the only thing I look forward to at the moment. We don’t even have to do anything special, and sometimes we don’t say any more than a handful of words to each other, but having her close by just feels so right. I can talk to her, open up to her, cry with her and not feel judged or misunderstood in any way. I’m there for her as much as I can be too, and listening to her fears and preoccupations takes my mind off my own.